your love is a drug
She wakes up on the ground. She wakes up with a jerk.
She wakes up with a cry on her chapped lips.
And she doesn’t remember.
Jae doesn’t remember coming down here — a concrete floor, flickering lights. Damp walls and a cold draft. She doesn’t remember falling down those stairs. She must have, right? There’s a horrible ache inside her… but not in her head.
It’s in her ribs, crawling up her throat, beating and beating and beating and beating -
She doesn’t remember taking the drug. A perfect circle. A perfect cherry-red. A perfect drug placed in her imperfect hand, bitten-down nails and shaking fingers and she hadn’t taken it, right?
Had she?
She doesn’t remember getting here.
Is that what this is? A side effect?
A hallucination of walls dark with damp. The smell of iron. A cold, dirty floor. Something scurries in the corner and disappears.
Jae gets up. It hurts. It beats and beats and beats and Jae wishes it would stop, God why won’t it stop -
The stairs. Those stairs. She can go back up. She can go back to where she had been.
She steps, one foot in front of the other.
Thump thump thump goes the pain under her ribs, one after the other.
The drug. Had she taken it? She had, hadn’t she?
She had slipped that perfect red circle on her tongue and she had swallowed. She had swallowed it down and it had dissolved and disintegrated and bled in the dark wetness of her stomach and it had dissolved, spreading out through her body. It had dissolved and it had crept into every corner, every crevice, every joint and muscle and into her skin, under her skin — so thin, so vulnerable — her bones — hollow — the oily, dark depths of her eyes.
It had gone everywhere, deeper and deeper and deeper, beating and beating and beating and beating and beating in her veins.
Cherry-red. A perfect circle. Perfect.
It brought her here. It’s taken her here. It’s blinded her, bound her, dragged her down here, pushed her down those stairs to this long, dark tunnel where there is no air.
There is no air.
Only rot and cold and damp.
There is no air. Jae cannot fly.
She can only climb. She climbs, she crawls, she pushes herself up the stairs… until she realizes they are going down not up.
They are going down and she is upside down. Her hair hangs down over her ears, over her face, a perfect circle. She is blind and the sugar is on her tastebuds and the drug is in her veins and it’s muffling her, trapping her, sedating her.
She is going deeper, farther. Until she is right-side up again. Right-side up in another tunnel. A tunnel like the last. Fluorescent lights beating, flickering, beating, flapping, birds with no air, beating against the ceiling.
Jae remembers now. That drug being slipped into her hand, her imperfect fingers and grasping nails… by a hand much more steady.
A hand. A palm and lines that criss-crossed, overlapping, a maze of lines, pipeline dreams. A hand with polished, unbroken nails. A hand steady and warm.
A mouth warm and sweet, curved up against hers. Candy-coated words, candy-coated smiles, candy-coated promises. Arms to hold her.
A palm with a cherry-red pill in the middle. A voice.
It won’t hurt you. It won’t hurt you. It won’t hurt you. I won’t hurt you.
Jae drops to her knees. The concrete is hard and cold and dirty and the cold seeps through her clothes, it crawls up her skin and it plucks at her until she feels laid bare, naked. Exposed under the fluorescent lights, trapped in this maze of tunnels.
She doesn’t remember coming here.
She covers her ears with her hands. She bows her head. She curves, the straight line of her body bending, bending, bending, knees to chest, an infinite loop of hollow bones and thin skin and oily eyes and a tongue stained cherry-red.
I won’t hurt you. I won’t hurt you. It won’t hurt you. Swallow it.
Beating, beating, beating in her chest. Horrible pain. Horrible, sickening, mind-bending pain and Jae wants to reach down her throat with her shaking, imperfect, bitten-down nails and she wants to grab that beating, beating, beating thing and she wants to rip it up, she wants to squeeze it between her fingers until it bursts, until it sprays these dark, damp walls with cherry-red.
Then maybe she’ll be light enough. She’ll fly back up, past those flapping fluorescent lights, through that dark cage of a ceiling, to the air. She’ll find the air. Her tongue will no longer be red. Her fingers will be.
But it’ll be okay.
Her chest will be hollow enough to fly. Empty and bare and invaluable, nothing to steal there, nothing to take.
And no matter how many perfect, red circles are held out to her, Jae won’t swallow. She won’t place that cherry-red, perfect circle drug back on her tongue and let it dissolve in the dark damp of her stomach. She won’t make such a tragic mistake again.
So she does what she has to do.
Jae reaches down, down, down, down to that beating trapped in the cage of her ribs and she curls her bitten-down fingernails around it and she pulls it up and she chokes it up and she gags on it and then it’s there in front of her — red and beating and pulsing and bleeding.
And she crushes it.