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Some people say they lose their spark with the end of an era, an addiction, but I lost my shadow. I stare up at dusk’s spiral clouds like I’m waiting for a cyclone that won’t come. Like I’m a fiend for the fervor of wind and hail storms, yet I’ve always preferred a champagne-pink haze, wakeless water under the bridge. 

I had that in my chapped palms a few months ago, the calmness to light my veins bioluminescent, someone to steady my wrist as the plunger pressed sunset-orange into me. It felt like someone tossing me a life preserver when my face was barely an island in the waves’ tumult, my throat constricting, singeing, until the thrashing dimmed into hydro-acoustics. Something Ariel could keep time to. 

Now, I lose track of time with all the tallies I’ve tacked to my arms. I’ve lost my name. Little Shadow. I can’t forget the prick of erasure even though it keeps me intravenous, dosing away the uncertainty. I rub my marks like masturbating, like carpet-burned, a bright and swollen blush, remembering… 

That’s why I’m back on this rooftop. Ruminating on crusted cud. Want that oceanic feeling, those underwater ears to blot out the bleating. A hotel pool is close enough, a city’s conch shell. Where the new me was birthed. 

I lie on the scratchy loveseat, still hearing his laughter echoing off magenta tiles. Swear I feel the splash speckling my nose like when he said, ‘You cling to me like you can’t swim.’ He shook his head with a switchblade smile: thin, sharp, gleaming like the rest of him. Barely had time to strip off his shirt before I was shivering around his waist. ‘Little Shadow,’ he dubbed, clucked his tongue then twisted it around mine.

Looking down at the sulfur streetlamps, the people staggering out of bars and into back alleys where they’d lose the last of their cash, he said, ‘I never watch the stars. There’s so much down here.’ 

I used to think that spoke to the poetry of his character, the quiet mania, the romance of chaos, wishing it was all contagious. Now I’m embarrassed for not knowing those were Top 40 lyrics. The shame is on par with what follows: accepting that bump of Afghan brown to drape me in rivulets of warmth as he made his blazer into my blanket.

I slumped against his shoulder, feeling so high in the head and low in my body like being tickled internally, stomach acids stirred like a witch’s brew. Long blinks. Mustaches of sweat. Loose, wet vertebrae. Hollowing cheeks filling with spit.

I remember my legs so hot and heavy, sand-smooth as I kneeled, regurgitating on the concrete edge into the infinity pool, thinking the seafoam-green Hpnotiq looked so sickly beautiful swirling around the water and stars like some cosmic looking-glass. That I was untouchable like those reflected stars force-fielded from my projectiles.

I must’ve looked like I escaped a forest tomb, hair frizzled to twigs, chunk of guava garnish on my chin, but he said I ‘make letting go look elegant.’ Even as he thumbed the slick of sick off my collarbone. 

I think they call that trauma binding, or bonding. I don’t care the sealant. Welders’ sparks or twine, I’d take two. So much care and unexpected compliments at my ugliest elevated the euphoria. I think I kept gagging as a reflex to usher in more caressing words. Kept sniffling powder over the hours to nourish that neediness with a new lover. Probably no more than a matchstick’s head over the course of the night… But eye of the needle, eye of the storm.

It sprinkled our next rendezvous. At a tennis court as pink as my Converse. But it felt nice on nearly sunburnt skin. Panting after a few rounds, we sat on the same side of the net. He pulled out a couple medicinal lollipops, let me have a suck of strawberry. Looked like hard cotton swabs. Milligram inscription pigmented the same turquoise as the dragonflies hopscotching our puddles.

My eyes widened when he said, ‘Fentanyl. Like they let soldier boys with blown-off legs lick ’til they fall in the dirt. Quick to sedate. Hard to overdose when they slip out so soon.’

Almost dropped the sucker then and there, but he re-plugged me, saying, ‘I’m only giving you two more seconds. Let it last.’ So, I pulled from it languidly like a cigarette, depressing my lungs deeper. Daring my dependence, though there would be no throwing up this date. I was just made more limber, light, ’til I lost my racket and wallet but didn’t mind. No pain to the slo-mo penetration on the steaming acrylic. Felt hugged by humidity, not resigned to it.

‘Will I remember it?’ I kept saying even three weeks later and sometimes sober. I was afraid my memories could be chipped away from the bumps of my brain like tree bark. Was.   

By then, I was nodding out on the assembly line. He’d tease, clipboard-tapping my arm, saying, ‘Another long night?’ like he didn’t stash a baggie in the brand tag of his cheap purple tie.

In his office, sometimes he’d let me steal a sniff off his fingertips to ‘maintain.’ Ironic, a vinegar smell is supposed to be associated with cleaning products or party chips. Yet I’d be rapturous to lie fetal on my unswept floor, feeling the love of God and a hundred ghosts like I recreated all the back-pats at grad bash. 

He said we’d celebrate my promotion in the Marin Headlands, but I said, ‘How about Mars?’ Lana Del Rey sang something about Cali being a portal to the moon. Close enough a compromise, we traversed the Lost Coast to a different black sand beach, zipping through cliffsides. Landing next to a squat lighthouse near nightfall, where the echo of shore-break and our gasps amplified everything, we saw why it was called Shelter Cove. Junkies in paradise.

Carbon-black ground, stark white tides that turned into tall mist. Overcast like my insides, my irises.  So gorgeous, it burned my eyes. It looked like Limbo. Purgatory was always painted icy or cool-tone in my mind’s eye: peacefully traversing a berg-block, the sound singular, the expanse infinite, untouched. Midnight blue and blinding ivory, but I knew when you reached the end, despite the shadowy veil, the soggy climate, you’d feel more like a cat sleeping in a sunbeam. 

And I did. I did. I did.

It felt intimate as twins touching hands in utero, scratching each other’s noses. Care so intuitive, second-nature, a callback to being a baby left in the cradle too long as our moms gobbed on the phone, deaf, curled into sallow rubber cords. Like we silently answered each other’s cry twenty years later. Synchronicity, predestination.

Stroking, snorting, sinking over needlepoint promises. We Eskimo kissed until we got sick. Two nods later, I crashed so hard, I contemplated crushing and smoking teeny seashells to scoop serenity back into my pores. I laughed as I dug up sea-soot. Winked at the bleeding wrinkles, comparing my waterlogged fingertips to Frosted Mini-Wheats. When did I get outside, so close to the riptide, consider pebbles a pillow?

            He said, ‘If you’re going through Hell, keep going.’

And I knew that line. Frost or Churchill or Wilde, somebody farther than arm’s length or life and therefore wiser. So, I answered, ‘Halfway there. I’ll beat you to it,’ and knocked powder into my nostrils so I could feel like candy floss or flour, between all states of matter, kneadable, mistaken for needable, ethereal as a flower.

Again. 

Again. 

‘Again!’ Every chant at a child’s ride.

He always had a spare hidden behind his ear or ID card or grin or gaffe or joke. ‘Why don’t you fight me for it?’ he kidded, slurred in a faraway way that buttered my ears as it slid and tapped into the drums as he laid clinch-close. His hand was framing his eye like a monocle, a dart target, and that’s the first time I noticed the tan-line on his ring finger. ‘Last line goes to who wants it worse, Little Shadow.’

Everything is worse when I’m wanting. The H is a dome disconnecting me from the whys and what-ifs as I wondered about that pale line on his hand instead of the one in it. Numb the heart tugs and tummy aches. Mediate the downdrafts of mood, the curious uptick of a brow. Not question why every date is outdoors, away from homes, what’s worse: a pocketed wedding band or one pawned for China white. 

At the least, I had to forget the monotonous factory work between vacations far and local lest I snap, shrug off that nose-scrunching chemical scent our lab coats carried and the bask in the chemical reactions between me and a most salacious supervisor. Forget what time and tomorrow and tearing apart means for money and mindsets and meaning.

That’s why I had to win.

I dug my dull nails into his temples so he could look me straight on as I said, ‘If I don’t get that next hit, you will. I’ll stain that black beach pink. Then your Little Shadow won’t seem so secret, will she?’

He swallowed, pin-pupiled, then so did I. 

Between waves of euphoria and blackout, I buoyed. Brain hijacked by those lightning strikes of hatred, of hunger. 

And so much later I’m still tossing and turning under constellations I can’t name, skim or scrape through like a pool ledge. My sky fading pink to black like a bruise. I didn’t wanna share the view, the vials.

Now, I don’t wanna supplier, a looming figure to follow while still casting doubt. When someone passes me the telescope, I wanna refuse.

‘Little Shadow,’ he or his hallucination husks into the smoggy rooftop, feet slap-stumble-wading around the darkened pool closer to my wooden raft of a bench. 

It doesn’t matter which it is, my answer has to be the same, even if it scuddles out shier after hours or weeks or months from his latest cast-off. 

My hair still prickles on edge, nape sunburn-sensitive with the full-body flush. I make fists but not so my veins pop. I make letting go look elegant, remember? I reassure myself, unclenching my body by half and my soul by whole when I say a small ‘…no,’ like I don’t know her. Like I wish I never did him. Like I’m not scratch-digging new junctures into old punctures, bleeding red, orange, black, brown, pink, white, blue…

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Paige Johnson is EIC of Outcast Press, which just released Slut Vomit II: An Anthology of Sex Work. It features many Urban Pigs and Anxiety Press authors. Her work has been in Urban Pigs Press many times. This includes their HUNGER anthology with a tale about a lonely bulimic cam girl on Valentine’s Day, their Unintended Consequences call with “White Lies” about a dorky Miami drug dealer, the Addiction submission involving the same character on a ketamine-fuzzy date with his Only Fans crush, and a couple pieces for UPP’s inaugural poetry issue called Journeys. The latter are now published in her illustrated poetry book Citrus Springs, sequel to Percocet Summer.

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