Sweet bulbs grow on our windowsill, or the windowsill that was once ours but is now, more properly, mine; mine alone though this place was never mine in isolation to begin with. This morning I watered those bulbs, which threaten to burst open in beauty but never do. I watered the bulbs and then watered my throat, feeling it lubricate the barbed wire in my oesophagus. The coffee – which I had poured but did not remember so doing – cooled in the pot. By the time I poured it into my mug, the steam was gone, but my lips did not blister when I brought it to them. The world outside of my world was all fog and deep blue sky, the sun peering shyly and golden up from behind the Co-Op below. Orange streetlights sputtered. The coffee had steeped for too long and was too bitter. I spat it back into the mug and poured the whole sorry thing away. Dregs caught in the sink and I left them there, let them glare up at me.
I sat at the table and dared the sun to rise further, staring at it until my eyes watered and stung, and then I drummed my fingertips on the table to a rhythm of my own design until those fingertips ached and grew red.
Once the sun was up, glowering in its entirety, grown bold in its conquest of the whole horizon, once the sky was a lighter shade of grey and the fog had begun to lift – only then did I look down, and cease the frenetic beat.
Last night, or the night before, I sat at her computer desk and ate pear drops. Ate the motherfuckers. Not sucked, not whittled down into nothing, not smoothed down into a flat, tasteless disc by the amylase in my saliva, ATE them. Chew, swallow. Shards of glass in the oesophagus.
The drops were coated in a thin layer of something sticky and a little soft, had a little give, tasted of chemical. Then immediately they would snap between my molars, sometimes in half, or thirds, and other times into tens of pieces. Chew chew chew, candy against the canine, suffering my incisors into a sugary trap that rotted down into the root of the canal, sweetening my nerves.
They had been poured, alongside a packet of sour edibles, into a tupperware with fasteners that had snapped off and did not help to pop the lid closed. I think perhaps she had mixed in the edibles in an attempt to surprise herself, to be wait, you mean there are drugs in this? And then to say something smart, sort of, after swallowing – well, that just happened, voice dripping with an angry sardonic but still funny sort of edge, cool girl. Who cares? I eat drugs. I drink weed and smoke absinthe. But actually right now I eat pear drops only, because there is no surprise, like, there never is. I knew that the gummies had weed in them; I made conscious efforts to choose those when I wanted, and to not when I don’t. And last night and the night before, I didn’t, so I ate the pear drops instead, chewed on ‘em, drug-free, sugar-full. Yum!
They stuck together in the pot, suturing in the heat. I worried them apart with my tongue, prising them away, letting sticky trails of sugar syrup drip from my lip onto my chin, which I lapped up with all the quickness of a bitch in heat. And I got, eventually, through the entire box, and my sleep that night was thick and slow and it cracked like crème anglaise when my alarm shattered the sanctuary. I woke, bolt upright, head lead-heavy, still upright at the computer desk. The computer was no longer there; I remembered, in a slow daze, that I had sold it for its parts weeks ago and had neither wiped, nor saved, the data on it.
I remembered briefly the first time I smoked an actual joint. My father, a keen smoker, had rolled me one to take to a friend’s house when I was eighteen; seeing the stuff in grinders and in papers and scattered, as dust, across the kitchen table had done well to inoculate me against the hard appeal it held amongst my peers. But I had just got in good with the crowd of slightly scary girls who smoked it under the bridge, modern-day fairy-tale trolls who were once princesses in their mothers’ eyes. The entire walk to our rendezvous point was one of palpitations and tiny, short-squeezed lungs. I pictured cells, my one phone call, being kicked out of school. But me and my illegal goods were not intercepted and I was received with a surprising joy and elation, one which deepened as I passed around the joint, and offered the first hard, deep toke to the scariest and snarliest of the girls. Mostly, I just wanted to watch her do it, to look for a tip, a trick. She handed it back to me with a lipstick smear across the thin paper. The orange tip lit the night and I took a little puff, and coughed immediately, and the air crackled with laughter.
‘Californian,’ many of them said, but nobody was laughing at me, and I took that as a victory, a win, a clear sign of acceptance into this world I barely understood and did not have any deep desire – I realised later – to actually belong to. I didn’t smoke the stuff really ever again, not until about seven years later, when I met her for the first time. Like before it made my throat itch and my eyes water, but by her I was more dazzled than by those silly girls that I had found so scary, and that made the bitter earthy taste a little sweeter on my tongue.
But now she is gone, and now I don’t smoke it at all.