CAVITY
Pink clouds settle hazily around her mindless body, blanketing her eyes, gumming up every last crevice of her brain. Quinn lies, sprawled across her bed, motionless and seemingly asleep. A small Ziplock filled with white bars and blue tabs spill across her nightstand like Halloween candy. Her bedside wall is jacketed by glossy album cover prints, ranging from the silky lavender of Apolonio to the glimmering, textured orange of Plastic Beach.
Her room is eerily dim, void of both moonlight and air. It’s stuffy,—stagnant...just inescapably: empty. Something smells off, conjuring up the nauseating scent of scorched cotton candy vape juice. The sweet sedation of nostalgic fixation has infiltrated her poor head.
A disturbed giggle gushes out of her mouth like syrup, maniacally cutting through the discomforting, haunting nothingness suspended in her room. Cuddling her plushie of Noodle from Gorillaz, she rolls over—narrowly missing the neck of her sunburst Fender, Syd. The hit probably wouldn’t have made a difference anyway, considering her neglect already cranked it way out of tune. Her eyebrows shoot up in imagined excitement as she...drools…profusely, actually.
Ha hA
Ha hA
Ha hA
Ha hA
HA
it’s cotton candy
MOREMOREMORE
MOREMOREMORE
MOREMOREMORE
MOREMOREMORE
MOREMOREMORE
MOREMOREMORE
MOREMOREMORE
MOREMOREMORE
MOREMOREMORE
…promise
Dear God, keep her safe.
Hey memory. Me again. I know I have been annoying the absolute shit out of you for the past hour, but I have no other plans tonight. You know you’re pretty flattering, thinking I actually have a life outside of you.
It’s only been a month since you had to head back up to NorCal, and all I’ve been doing is repeatedly slamming my head into the past until I can feel something even remotely similar to when you were here, next to me.
You came down to LA for your birthday, and for once got to chill at my place. I figured I’d fix it up for you, since you were coming such a long way. I remember laying out a spliff and two White Claws on a tablecloth and thinking how corny it looked. Thinking, “wow, I could really top this one off by showing up to the front door with a rose in my mouth.” Of course, I didn’t end up doing that. But you loved it, either way. When you arrived, I took your hand, feeling how frigid it was in the December air, and pulled you inside. I may be an asshole, but I am a suave asshole. That smile when I first saw you was genuine. No rose required.
Every day since then, I’ve thought about you like it was my fucking job. I know you always made fun of me for not being able to handle anything under 70°, and being an LA jerk, and maybe you were right. I’m a mess. And I was only a dick to you because I liked you, which unfortunately makes me sound like a teenage boy, now that I say it out loud. It gets cold pretty easily without you, is what I’m trying to say. These days, I’m really only kept warm by my memory
(and some pills).
A warm flash forcibly floods the empty fissures of Quinn’s brain.
Visions of you against candied California sunsets and of us carefreely chucking rocks off the Top of the World paint over the present. I met you there last summer, a few months after I played Slim’s up in SF. It was the last stop on my Cali run, and somehow I got to wrap up right before the world went on lockdown, and before Slim’s closed permanently. I still think about that. Had to stay on an old high school friend’s couch for a while. I made time for some fresh air here and there, ‘cause he does not know what opening a window means. And I always needed to get out of my head back then. Still do, I guess.
So, I hiked up there alone—kicking dirt in my white Jadons, smoking, marveling at Mother Earth. Thinking about where this whole music thing was going—if it was going anywhere. I’d recently broken off from left my band to start a solo career, though not without my fair apportionment of doubt. You needed to “get the fuck away from your roommate” (your words, not mine), so you drove up to watch the sunset. We were alone in that parking lot for a while. So naturally, I think we hit it off pretty well. I never shut up after you almost (accidentally?) hit me, and you graciously listened. Your name was Kiara, and you were nice to meet me.
Things were pretty straightforward from there (that, of course, wasn’t the first time I’d gotten into a stranger’s car the day I met them). But, when the sky fell pink, unwanted hoards of strangers pulled up beside us to watch. So, sandwiched in between two frat dudes taking bong rips in their van, and a straight couple bumping Steve Lacy in their sedan: was us. Locked in your little, abysmal: Ford C-Max. You took out a disposable Kodak and told me to say Mitski—apparently, it was for your photo wall, and not a sex trafficking website. I smiled—partly because I said Mitski—but also because at that moment, I’d forgotten about any LA girl I’d ever been with.
With your windows covered with a picnic blanket and my drug rug—we escaped, for a moment, to a world of our own. The interior of that car will forever be humid, its oxygen lashed with spun sugar, smoke, and sweat. The bristly heat of your laughter on my ear still stays seared in my memory.
A dumb, Cheshire smile tugs at Quinn’s unconscious lips, and a subdued flicker of summer illuminates the dark
cavity
in her chest.
oral fixation
A lot of you exists up here, in this zero-gravity headspace removed from time: where no one else can see you but me. Replaying my memories...lights my insides on fire, like my body’s a fucked-up hot air balloon floating into the ozone. Aimless. Probably gonna crash. But delusional trips through my imagination are better than no trips at all. Getting high, visiting you in these clouds—it just gives me something to do. And God knows there hasn’t been much of anything to do lately.
Another warm flash blankets the blackness, indulging Quinn further into a decaying decadent dream.
You laid on my chest like a little kid. Observant. Silent. Stoic, but starry-eyed. The blades on the back of your neck were soft. Trickled right through my fingertips like warm, honeyed silk. Too precious to hold. I stared at the ceiling, thoughtless, but simultaneously aware that that moment was going to end very, very soon. I kept silent, trying to hold each fleeting second close. The silver sign of Venus around my neck skipped to the drum of my heart, and you watched. I held my breath.
“That’s not gonna work.”
“And I’m gonna try anyways.” I said, puffing up my cheeks, straining my gaze. You laughed, and resumed watching.
“Dear God, keep her safe.”
I wanted nothing more than to lay in that bed forever, to hear more about what was on your mind. It’s hard to hide how much I care about someone, even if I don’t know them that well. My mom always used to tell me how heartbroken I got over my crushes in grade school. How I was always a sore loser, and lover. Of course, that problem hasn’t really abated since. I don’t let go of things that easy. So, inebriated only by oxytocin, I worked up the courage to ask you what you were thinking about. To try and see what made you tick.
“Nothing,” you said, tensing up slightly.
Then you stayed silent. We stayed silent. It’s funny. Even when you were right in front of me, you still existed mostly in my head. I take what I can get.
I pried my eyes open, unfortunately met only by the hazy darkness of my studio. Feeling the warmth of my own, sickly sweet breath bouncing back at me is a shit substitute for another human being. If my memory serves me right, stomach acid isn’t the only acid I’m tasting. I checked my phone. 4:43 AM. Read No notifications. I opened one of the plastic water bottles by my bed and drank until dribbles of liquid ran wearily down my chin.
Whatever. Summer’s no match for the New Year. Woohoo. I love January. My head’s a fucking party.
Quinn’s esophagus tightens Halfway through the bottle, I choked and started hacking. I looked at the figure hunched over in the bedroom mirror. Her eyebrows were furrowed, and somewhat despairing. Her eyes looked dead. I looked away.
Why did summer have to end? Making all those stupid decisions under unrelenting daylight brought me back to the summers I had just a few years ago. Always ditching class, messing around with Syd in board shorts and a sports bra—hitting on people I met at The Echo. Digging my lips into the heat of your neck. I’m getting distracted.
Maybe it never has to end, as long as I keep burning it deeper into my mind. If I just maintain it: it can stay real. Memories are, in a way, recycled happiness. Call me an environmentalist.
I tossed the plastic water bottle into the trash and climbed back into bed, feeling my eyes fall lower and lower, eventually shutting. Clutching Noodle, I welcomed what seemed to be another dream. The space between my brows began to swell with a piercing warmth, overwhelmed by intense, overlapping visions. A little romanticization here and there can’t hurt. Can’t shit on me for having a bit of lighthearted fun. Yeah—that’s it. I don’t think I gotta read into it too much.
Quinn’s esophagus tightens—constricting to an ever-shrinking point until the lack of breath begins to cut her off from any dream she had left. The
rotted pit in her throat falls through the cavity in her chest, down to the bottomless void in her stomach.
Her head begins to throb with leaden waves of repressed anxiety and the pressurized vice grip of feared abandonment.
Her void has broken free.
Right?
A gaping hole opens up in Quinn’s bed, swallowing her in the silence of the night. Asleep—she falls,
down,
down:
the gravity of a shattered dream pulling her towards the inevitable nightmare she had tried so desperately to
run from.
