One tequila, two tequila, three tequila, four – I suck down drinks with a wince until I’m drunk enough to suck ‘em down and not wince. It’s Friday, the start of the weekend, and that means I’ve got a full week of shit to forget about, just like every other weekend that ever has been and probably ever will be. Tonight I won’t remember that exam I failed on Tuesday or that on Wednesday I cheated on my girlfriend for the second time. By midnight I won’t remember exactly how many drinks I’ve had or exactly what bar I’m at. I’ll forget that I was late on my rent payment yet again this month due to my total inability to save money for important things.

I’ll become the here and the now and the music and the lights and the laughter and the touching and the friendship and the youth. For a short period I’ll take my life into my own hands.

The thing about alcohol, though, is that it’s called a depressant for a reason. Once I come down, I’ll find myself down some alley or on some curb, my head in my hands and my girl rubbing my back and doing her best to stop my tears. But I won’t stop crying because all of a sudden I remember that exam I failed which is just the latest of many keeping me from graduating. I remember my continuing infidelity, my financial instability. But I especially remember the drunken car crash that killed my brother and left me without a scratch.

He was going to be a dad. He never knew. Kaila is 18 weeks old now, and she will never forgive me when she’s grown. Neither will her mother, or my own. My dad hasn’t spoken to me in over six months. He hates me, and I would hate me, too. I do hate me. I can’t blame any of them.

All I can do is try to forget, one drink at a time, one night at a time.

Tomorrow I can try again.

It would almost slip out sometimes, when I wasn’t paying close enough attention to my words – the “L Bomb.” It tried several times to escape during that final, deep intake of breath at the end of a particularly hard laughing fit. It fought away from my lips that I could barely keep clasped together when we stared at each other late at night, struggling to control our teenage antics.

It caught me by surprise how soon I started thinking about you in that way, and I was sure you thought about me the same. But I didn’t want to give in, not just yet; I didn’t want to be that guy who fell in love too fast. There was no fighting it, though. I loved you just as much then as I did when I finally let it explode. And when that bomb went off, we stood together in awe of the effects. I remember the vibrant colors, and the rush of air as the world flew around us, and the feeling of your arm around my shoulder while we gazed forever upwards at the greatest spectacle of our lives.

I never expected the dust to settle so soon, covering my world with endless grays, when I had finally gotten used to the gold of your eyes. When I had finally started to believe I actually deserved to live in a world of color.

Black, perfect black. Not the fake, almost-black-but-kinda-gray black. Real black. That’s what I feel inside of me all the time. There is no light, just the absence of it. There is no color, no warmth, just dark, cold, solid blackness that grows bit by bit each day. It started as a numbness in my fingers, right at the very tips. After a while it started to tingle, like when your leg falls asleep. The tingling spread through the rest of my hands and up my arms. Then the tingle disappeared. Or maybe it’s still there, but I went from recognizing that dull ache of numbness to feeling nothing at all. Just the absence of it.

Whenever I feel the tingle, I know I’m about to lose more of myself to the dark. But when the nothingness got to my memory, it took over even quicker there than anywhere else. The tingle never came. All I can remember is the black. I know there must have been a time before it. A time of color and warmth. There must have been. Right?

People I vaguely recognize try to talk to me sometimes, or rather they talk at me, because I don’t really hear them. My hearing is on its way out. They give up soon enough because they figure I’m ignoring them, but the truth is that I don’t know how to tell them I don’t understand their attempts. I stopped speaking a long time ago. I don’t remember my last words.

On the days when I manage to do more than count the ringlets in the wooden coffee table, I dig out the same lighter I’ve had in a junk drawer since a one-night-stand left it here two years ago, and I experiment with the flame. I’m slowly turning the mahogany finish to a charred ebony color, and I hold my hand far too close to the flame than is normally safe.

I wish I could feel it, but it won’t be long before the black diminishes my hope, too. Then I won’t wish anymore. I’ll just be.

I’ll just be the black. I’ll just be the nothing.

That smell. It’s so familiar, where does it come from? I can’t place it, in the physical sense, the here and now. It follows me, it’s evanescent, it comes and it goes. But in the meaningful sense, the then and never again, its place is ingrained in me forever. It’s in my blood, under my skin, on my lips. It’s you.

I find you in my sheets, where you haven’t lain. In my new room at my new place, in a different town, a different state. I find you there when my eyes are closed and the sun is away. I find myself in your arms, where I lay many times. In those same old clothes, with those same old songs playing. I find myself there when my eyes are closed and the sun is near.

You roll over and I awaken, and find that I’m smiling. I quickly remember I have nothing to smile about. I roll over and take a deep breath, desperate to find a trace of you again. But you’re gone. I can’t control when you show up. No point trying to sleep again, it won’t come. I throw my legs over the edge and put my head in my hands. No point trying to cry again, it won’t come.

The stark white of the bathroom and the bitter blandness of my morning coffee reinforce that this is my reality. No more bleary-eyed smiles or sweet kisses. No more finding you in the kitchen frying eggs a little too long for my liking. You’re gone. Forever. No more. Then and never again.

I have moved on, in the physical sense. The places where our memories were made are not places I frequent. I’ve abandoned them, like you abandoned me. I’ve passed mountains and rivers, crossed oceans and continents. But in the meaningful sense, I can’t get away from your face, from your touch, but especially from your smell. They hold on to me.

And when the sun is away and I close my eyes, I find you in my sheets and I hold on to you.

Tonight is an oddly cold night on what has been an oddly warm autumn. Normally by now we’re under a few feet of snow, or at least a few inches. But somehow it’s the middle of November and the temperature has barely even dipped down into snow-making weather. If I knew how people make money off of betting, I’d like to take bets on the date when we will get our first snowfall, because every time I find myself walking outside into brisk air thinking, “Feels like snow,” it doesn’t snow.

Every exhale is visible, either breath or smoke. Somehow, inspired by the cold, we got on the topic of those ridiculous sweaters that overbearing dog-owners like to torture their poor animals with, which suddenly gets serious when Alex says, “Sometimes I feel like my dogs are my only friends,” and glances sideways at me. “How lame is that?”

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The thing about Alex Mayne is that, even though he’s well-liked, not a lot of people know all that much about him. We know that his family has lived in town for generations, and that his older brother Cody is serving life in prison for the murder of his girlfriend, Tanya. There are plenty of rumors surrounding that whole scandal. Some of them were pretty expected, like that she was pregnant or cheated, or pregnant because she cheated. My personal favorite though is that she had decided to join an extremist terrorist group and when she attempted to convince Cody to join her, he upheld his civic duty and killed her. I don’t know who comes up with these things, but it was the biggest thing to rock Stanton Falls in a long time, so naturally it was all people gossiped about for weeks.

I mean, prior to that, Stanton’s claim to fame was giving birth to an athlete who went to the ’92 Summer Olympics in Barcelona for hurdles. She only lived here for a few years before moving somewhere bigger and better, and it’s a bit farfetched to believe she actually started hurdling during those first fragile years of life. You can decide for yourself.

The other widely-known fact about Alex is that he doesn’t date. Plenty have tried their hand but a friendly hug is just about as far as you can go with the kid, and even then he seems to be guarded. One can only imagine that Cody is to blame for that. I think Cody is to blame for a lot of things that are wrong with Alex that no one really sees.

On the exterior, you see Alex as a normal teenager who laughs and smiles like the rest of us, but the Alex that I spend these nights getting to know holds some serious pain, and he holds it close. He has a pain that is tangible in the air, and I can definitely relate to pain. I think he can feel that from me, too, in the same way I feel it radiating from him. When I sit here smoking with him, Alex doesn’t seem much different from me. We don’t speak about the negative things. We just sit, talk, and laugh, and when we’re not talking or laughing, we just sit, smoke, and feel.

Inhale. Hold it in. Exhale. Every time Alex Mayne throws a party at his parents’ lake house, this is where I eventually end up - down by the lake with the only other person who has ever witnessed me high, Alex himself. We aren’t particularly good friends, barely even exchanging nods in the hallways at school. I think he only does it when he could play it off like he was acknowledging someone else should anyone ever question him about it. Our social circles hardly overlap. We don’t hate each other, we just don’t hang out. Not everyone who doesn’t hate each other has to hang out to validate their not hating each other.

Yet here we are. Hanging out. Every other Saturday, I find myself side by side with him, our backs against a tree, our bums soggy from the late night moisture on the ground, sharing a joint or two. We always find each other here right when everyone else is drunk enough not to notice our absence. Every time I slip away “to take this call,” I think that surely this is going to be the time that he doesn’t show up. This is the time he’s going to leave me feeling like a fool. But that anxiety never comes to light, because he’s always there before I am, waiting for me to arrive before he lights up. Surprising, since it’s his party and literally every person in that house craves his attention.

This is the only time I smoke. My first drag was right in this very spot, and I think I probably coughed my appendix up, while Alex laughed at me. There is no better way to determine a first timer. By now I don’t cough anymore, but Alex still laughs. We have a good time together, but it goes without saying that we are to tell no one about our little ritual. As far as anyone knows, we’re just two guys who sometimes exchange nods in the hallways at school.

Somehow I let the fear get inside. It slips in and takes me unawares, forcing a sharp intake of breath which allows nervousness and anxiety to find their way. They take hold, staking claim from my head to my stomach, bringing dizziness and queasiness. They surround my lungs so that I can’t breathe, and infiltrate all limbs so I can’t walk or hold myself up. The last to surrender, my heart alone fights them off as if to shout “you have no business here,” but it fatigues and weakens. The turmoil forms tears which well up inside my whole body and yet don’t come, for it is instead your gaze which meets my eyes, and your hand which encompasses mine. With one touch you end my struggle, and exile the fear which consumes me when you are not near. With you my heart will always be the victor.

I felt it fracture, slow and deliberate and a result of my own cause. The warm pain floods my frozen body, left numb but for the involuntary gasps emitted as feeling creeps back into nerve endings which have gone unused for some time. It roils over me, and I am caught in the pyre, left to only clench my jaw and eyes and hold my breath and pray that it is more bearable than last time. My heart is subject to the brunt of the flare, trembling and debilitated. When the rush is subdued and the wounds are mended, I find that my heart is no longer the same, but still left under my skin, still left a part of me.

The phantoms that plagued me for years, feeding off of my torment, are finally diminished, cast off with one final adieu. They went down swinging, insults thrown and past shortcomings brought back to the surface, attempting to sink a nail deep enough in my conscience to hang on just a while longer – old tricks that I have long since come to find unremarkable. The after effects of my mistakes have run their course, leaving me with the courage to toss away these demons in my closet, an act for which I feel no guilt. They can no longer follow me to my future, and I can go forth, without the weight of shame dragging my head down, as a liberated man with eyes on the sky.