She holds the blunt as if it’s precious; on the other side of tinged fingers, she hoped to burn away a past version of herself.
One hundred tablets. Someone sold that to her.
Jade took another hit.
Coughing, the smoke caught in her throat, the forceful kick thinning the smoke hanging still — now dissipated beyond where the faint light could catch it.
The party itself, as all parties do, had ended up on the roof. Well, that was true until the others had slowly made excuses and drifted downstairs, unwilling to withstand the pinching icy air, but she felt it was deserved. The enervating dusk filled the gloom of June, and the fairy lights that were hung over the clouded pool downstairs glistened. She scoffed at the optimism of the two delirious people who clearly had never dismantled fairy lights at 2 a.m. Below, the frosted doors lead into the kitchen – a litter of green bottles laced with promises of a forgettable evening had been strewn away from unsteady hands and bodies.
It is this version of the suburbs she prefers. A low civic hum as the traffic drones on, cut out by a muffled cheer of a crowd as something older washes over the speakers; The White Stripes bass, she knows, would be a better place to bury her anxiety rather than at the end of this blunt, but she’s not quite there yet. Defeated, a familiar ache ebbs in her, the way grey fumes fill a room unnoticed until you can no longer differentiate the taste of your own tongue from the smoke.
Somewhere, a set of traffic lights circle through their colours to no witness. Somewhere, a pharmacy closes for the evening, the overhead, fluorescent lighting obscuring more than it shows. Her head throbs, tidal, red and amber behind her eyes. She does not mean to think about the pharmacy. Something, anything else.
Her vignetted vision had become untethered from her, the phasing lights now pulsing in and out of existence. A comforting sort of disappearing acts. She thinks about how the lights at the hospital do not flicker in and out of existence. Instead, they shine relentless overhead, in a steady draining of life. So much for anything else.
A door clicks. Steps follow. Min laughs as she walks through it, the sound arriving before she does, and for a moment she is merely a hazy recreation, or a memory. She steps into the dark. It’s been four years; she looks the same, and yet nothing like herself.
‘There you are.’
Her eyes land on the blunt.
‘I’ve been looking.’
She says this lightly, the way you say things you might mean.
She sits without asking, pulls her knees to her chest, and holds her hand out for a smoke. Jade passes it, staring.
She goes on, ‘Marcus is downstairs,’ she breathes out a laugh, ‘He’s gotten so-’ she stops. Laughs. ‘You know.’
She doesn’t know and hasn’t spoken to Marcus in two years, but she nods anyway.
‘How are you?’ She looks right back at her.
The city hums. The traffic lights cycle.
‘I’m okay,’ she hears herself talking. ‘Always something difficult, you know?’
‘Yeah.’ She takes a long drag, looks away, and exhales. Jade knows she will not ask. She’s learnt that difficult is a door you leave open for another person to step through. This is a kindness. It makes tonight impossible.
Say it, she wishes. Ask what I mean.
She doesn’t.
Min starts talking about her thesis. Her sublease. Someone at work — do you remember that girl from that tutorial in second year? Green hair? The one who-
She phases in and out. Yes, she remembers, of course she remembers. Her memory has always been too sticky, too good, catching everything it holds. She remembers the nurse’s face, laced with trepidation, a tight smile and a firm she’s going to be okay followed by a you should go home. She recalls the sterile waiting room, fluorescent lights pulsing, purgatorial.
Jade looks up at a spinning, dizzying sky. She glances around for something to hold her vision in place, anything, but nothing that would stay. The stars blur as a tightness in her chest arrives the way tides do — permissionless.
Instead, she thinks about four years ago.
Alice she thinks. And this is the first time she has thought of her name in over a year, a name washes her back, despair ebbing.
‘-Sorry I’m rambling.’ Min says, glancing over. ‘Ignore me.’
‘No, I-’
‘It’s fine, I always do this.’ She pinches the blunt back. ‘Tell me something. Tell me anything. It’s been what, a good couple years?’
Jade knows it’s been four. It’s strange to see Min like this, catching up as if that is all this conversation is. It’s disorienting to see that she’s moved on. How can Min not remember how long it’s been since…
The smoke curls between them.
‘Yeah, time flies fast, doesn’t it?’ It’s all autopilot. ‘Starting new work. You know how it is.’
Min nods. She seems to know. She had always done this. Min fills the air with noise, and Jade always let her, and has always been grateful for it, but underneath her gratitude, tonight, sits something akin to grief.
‘Do you remember-’ she starts.
‘Mm?’
Silence. Jade watches her.
‘Nothing. Just. We used to come to these all the time, didn’t we?’ A smile tugs at her mouth. ‘And now we’re here, and it just feels like I’m doing a poor impression of someone who used to do this.’
Yeah, Jade thinks. Are you waiting for her to walk through the door as well?
‘I know what you mean,’ she follows instead.
Their fingers brush as she passes the blunt.
The White Stripes filters up from below; someone in the kitchen shrieks and laughs too loudly. They both eye each other and huff out a laugh. The noise dissolves.
‘I miss her.’
Jade stills. She holds out the blunt.
‘Me too.’ She took it.
‘Our last conversation was about you, you know.’
‘Oh. Well. That kind of makes things worse.’
‘Yeah, I thought you’d think that. Well, at least I tried not to say.’
‘Thanks for trying.’
Min huffs an almost-laugh and goes quiet.
‘She’d just picked up Bon Iver’s CD.’
‘Skinny Love?’
‘Yep, just the one. Wanted me to tell you that it had been posted.’
A beat.
‘I told her to tell you herself.’
She surfaces, and the streetlights pulse softly. They are generous and indifferent, so she keeps looking.
‘I don’t know what happened to us after Alice.’
Jade knew what happened to them after Alice. Her grief. Even now, she was brimming with thoughts threatening to spill and spill until they drowned them. Let alone back then.
Instead, she says something smaller, truer.
‘I didn’t know how to be us without her.’
Min frowns. Nods.
‘Are we okay, like really?’
Jade starts.
And stops.
They told me she’d be okay, and to go home. She’s numb. What does it mean to lose someone slowly, not in pieces but in the way you lose a language, a tongue you never practise? What is grief if not something you simply learn to carry without drowning in your own questions of self-pity? What if-
She wished the smoke might take her with it, that if she burned long enough, that old version of herself would vanish. But nothing burns clean.
The blunt, mere embers, bites her fingers.
‘We’re getting there.’
