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"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.