"Pill Fiend" by Cody Roggio
We’re lying in bed together and I try pulling her closer but I can’t pull her any closer without actually absorbing her body into mine and I feel like that wouldn’t be healthy. I try anyway by squeezing my arms around her. She moves her leg slightly and is able to adjust herself closer to me without fully becoming a part of me, so that we are currently holding each other as close as two humans possibly can. There is music playing.
“This song reminds me of my mom,” I say.
“How?” she says.
“The line, ‘when I see you, I really see you upside down.’ She used to drink a lot and one time my dad and her were driving my friends and I to a party and we were listening to this and she heard that line and started cracking up and wouldn’t stop laughing.”
“Is that a good memory?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” I say.
I think of the car moving through a neighborhood in my hometown. It was Halloween; the sky was purple, there were houses lit up, the air was autumn.
I think of that same neighborhood but this time it's during winter and a snowy haze is coating the ground and blurring the homes.
I think: I have wasted my entire life.