Page 42 of Brutal for It
The first flood is always the same. The edges blur, the noise hushes, the ache goes from a siren to a lullaby. The part of me that flinches at footsteps, at phone calls, at memories that are dark—she crawls under the bed and goes quiet.
I float. The air loosens its grip around my throat.
I tell myself this is the last time. The last storm. The last bad decision before the good ones line up neatly again. Just one more tide going out before I let it come in and carry me somewhere kind.
A sound at the door.
A voice with a person that doesn’t knock.
“Up,” he commands, and the syllable drags across the carpet like a chair.
I blink, slow. The world feels like it’s ten feet to the left of where it should be. I don’t answer.
He comes in anyway—he always does. He doesn’t look at me like a person. He looks at me like merchandise. Head tilt, quick scan, the calculation of whether I can walk, whether I’ll talk, whether I’ll bite.
“You’re booked,” he explains. “Group. Don’t start a mess. Keep it quiet.” A bag lands on the bed beside me. Another kind of escape for a different kind of hour. “You’ll need that between. Might get sore. Don’t embarrass me.”
My mouth tries to form no. The sound dies on the back of my tongue. The soft is too soft; the light he turned on is too bright. The high tells me Shhh. Let me carry you a little longer.
“Up,” he repeats, not unkind, not kind, an order plain and simple. “Now.”
I stand. My knees disagree. The room tilts and then rights itself because the body is a marvel even when the mind is smoke. I despise that. I love that. I despise that I love that.
He looks me over once more. This time like a mechanic deciding whether to put a car on the road again. “Okay,” he shares, satisfied with the lie we’re both telling. “Smile if you can. Quiet if you can’t.”
I try to make my face obey. It gets halfway there, then quits. He doesn’t care. He turns and I follow because that’s what today this life is… following. Out into the hallway that smells like old rain and air freshener. Past doors with numbers that can be bad luck. Down to the room at the end where the curtains stay closed even though it’s still light out.
There’s a knock—him, not me. The door opens. The world narrows to a thin long tunnel and I walk inside of it.
Men. Too many. One on the bed, one at the desk, two near the window, all of them laughing too loudly. They look at me like I’m a toy.
“Hi,” I hear myself say. My voice is a button someone pushes to prove the machine works.
The first one stands. He’s all shoulders and aftershave. He gives me a look that wants to be gentle, wants to pretend. But the reality is kindness isn’t inside him.
After that, it becomes an interval. Not because I’m gone—I wish I were. Because I am two people: the one who goes through the motions and the one who watches the ceiling stain become a moth and a door and a sky again. The watcher wants to pry the window open and climb out onto a road that leads to coffee and sunlight and the sound of an engine under a man who loves me for simply breathing. The one in the room keeps saying yes like a ghost who remembers the shape she was.
I try not to count. Counting makes it true. Counting makes it math, and math makes it an equation I have to solve. So I don’t. I never liked math. I let the numbers be blurry. I let the minutes melt into each other. I let the music from the parking lot fill the cracks.
The bag on the bed is a promise I hate. I don’t touch it at first. I tell myself I can do this on air and grit and the stupid numbness I bought an hour ago.
But bodies wear out faster than the lie.
My hands are clumsy where I wish they were claws. The high I came in on is coming down in a matter of the third partner to have my body. Knowing the relief I need is inside that bag mere inches away, I take it. The smallest line—so small—and the whole room toggles from survive to float again. Cocaine is good, heroin is better, meth would be best. For now the bump of cocaine will do. I want to vomit at the simplicity of it. I want to weep at the mercy of it. I want to scream because both are true.
“Good girl,” a voice says from somewhere.
“Don’t,” another says, not to me.
Laughter. A cough. The click of a lighter.
Water running in a bathroom that feels too far away.
It happens in loops. Touch, detach, drift, return. Repeat. I find myself at the window once, fingers on the curtain daydreaming about the freedom of fresh air. I could go, I think for a split second. I could try the knob and run. But to where? He’s in the hall. They’re in the room. My body is a coin in someone else’s pocket. I step back.
Halfway through—no, not halfway; there’s no true middle in a thing like this—I make a bargain with myself. If I live through this hour, I will go back. I will walk into a church basement that smells like bad coffee and plop into one of the folding chairs of shame and I will say my name like a woman who has one. If I live through this night, I will hand myself to people who know how to hold what I can’t. I will call my sister. I will tell the truth. I will pick myself up once again.
It feels like a promise. It feels like a threat. It feels like a prayer I might mean.
