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Conor
The cab driver asked if he should take me to the hospital. I told him no, just home. When he asked if I was sure, I repeated what I’d first said.
“Well, then, where’s home?” he asked as his tires crunched along the gravel.
Somehow, I ended up on the sidewalk outside of Dublin Ink. The lights were all out. Even the pink glow of the neon sign that normally ran all night was missing. It had always been missing a letter two, always imperfect, but had it gone out completely and I just hadn’t noticed? Had I replaced that soft, gentle light with another? Had that gone now, too?
I limped to the front door and unlocked it with trembling hands. I was too afraid to test the neon light. To flip the switch. To see whether it would come back. Or whether it was gone forever. Besides, the dark was fine with me. It was all I wanted. To sink into it. To be absorbed by it. To let it take me away where there was no pain.
I had just enough strength left to grab pills from the kitchen, whiskey from the bar cart, and a stack of drafting paper from my desk. After that there wasn’t even enough in me left to slowly lower myself to the couch. I fell like the dead. I gritted my teeth and swallowed back the pain. All too much like the living.
Rain still pattered on the big front window. I tugged the threadbare old crochet blanket that lived on the back of the faded floral print couch over my shuddering body. Maybe I wasn’t aware that it wouldn’t do much. Maybe the fever that wracked my whole body made my thoughts jumbled, my reasoning warped. Maybe I wasn’t aware that I needed to take off my soaked clothes. Change into dry ones. Turn up the heat. Put on the kettle. Or maybe I was thinking perfectly clearly. Maybe I just knew all that wouldn’t make a damned difference.
I was bound to spend in the night in agony. In alternating waves of fiery heat and bone-chilling cold. In shivers that kept me from sleeping. In back-arching pain as that knife was plunged again and again into my thigh. Striking bone. Carving away at me.
The bottle of whiskey shook so much as I raised it to my numb lips that it ran down my cheek. I swiped at it with the back of my hand and left the rest pooled in the hollow of my throat to tremble with the rest of me. I choked on the pills. Leaned over the side of the couch as I coughed. Tried not to throw up. Sank back with an unsteady groan.
I hated that the pain of my eye where Aurnia hit me felt soothing compared to the rest of me. I hated that counting my heartbeat in its steady throbs lulled me like a child counting sheep. I hated that I clung to the puffiness of my eyelid like a pillow. Because soon the rain would stop or the pills or the whiskey would kick in and then that was the only pain I would feel, that little discomfort at my eye. It would be all I knew. All that I couldn’t escape from.
What was worse? That, too, would soon be gone. A day or two. At most a week. I would feel fine. The bruising even, wouldn’t last forever. And then I would have nothing. Nothing to escape from. Nothing to escape to.
I flipped through the drafting pages to find a blank one to sketch on. I needed that scraping of charcoal against pulp. I need to draw something that wasn’t me. That wasn’t Aurnia.
As I was flipping through, letting papers fall to the side of the couch from an open hand like a dying man’s letter, I stumbled upon a smaller stack of pages forgotten in the mess.
It was Aurnia’s application for art school. She’d wanted me to read it. She put it on my desk so I would remember. Had I purposefully hidden it so I wouldn’t have to? Or had it just been lost because it was always meant to be lost? Because it was better off, in the end, lost from me?
The fever really must have been taking its toll, because I brushed my thumb over her sweeping cursive like it was her hair. The rest of the room spun like I was drunk or being tossed about at sea, but those messy, sprawling words of hers remained fixed in my vision. I read over them, muttering them aloud like a hesitant prayer.
To be honest, whoever is reading this at whatever school I’ll probably not get into, it was really hard to decide which of my pieces of art to submit. (By the way, I am still kind of having a hard time calling what I do “art”.)
I know that doesn’t sound great considering this is an application for art fucking school, but I figure it’s best to be honest upfront so I don’t get there and get uncovered as a fraud on like the first day or something. I don’t know what I’d call what I do. It’s always on brick or asphalt, rough things, hard things. Not smooth, soft things like paper or canvas. It’s never what I expected, whatever ends up on those rough things, those hard things. It just seems my heart takes off and I black out or something. When I wake up there something is that wasn’t before, you know? I don’t know, what would you call that?
Shoot, I think I’ve already messed this up. What was I supposed to be writing about?
Smiling felt so strange in that moment. But I couldn’t stop myself. I heard Aurnia in her words. I saw her bright eyes. Her fast-moving lips. I saw their colour. Lips and cheeks competing for the brightest pink. Smiling made my swollen eye throb and it felt right: I fucking deserved it.
It was hard to decide which of my pieces of “art” to pick.
You said to choose something that represented me. That said something about me. Something important to me. Or some bullshite like that. I probably shouldn’t write bullshite on an application form. It doesn’t matter. I’m only doing this so the monster of a man who’s keeping me captive won’t lock me in the supply closet again.
Joking. Just joking. Man, I’m bad at this.
Now I knew it was the fucking drugs, the goddamn booze. Because she was there. Right there beside me.
I looked through everything I had painted like a gazillion times and nothing felt right. I couldn’t see myself in any of it. I knew I had painted it. It was mine.
It wasn’t me.
I wanted to reach out and take her hand. I wanted to tug my little thief onto the couch with me. Have her nestle tight and bring me her warmth. I wanted her little voice to tickle my throat.
One day I saw another artist’s work. This brilliant artist. A real tortured soul type if you know what I mean. He showed me this phoenix that he did.
It was beautiful. Stunning really.
Also, and maybe this was because I loved him, because I had always loved him, this phoenix was also sad. Its wings were so bright and so wide and just looking at it you were sure that it could reach dazzling heights.
But above it was there was this nothingness. Not nothingness like the sky. Nothingness like a hole. Like an emptiness. A swallowing nothingness.
