HOME | DD

Description
      Her love is a devil’s lie.  A charming thought I have fallen for on several occasions.  I gaze at her through my greased and sweaty hair.  It feels like over-done noodles as I push it out of my face to really look upon her.
She tells me her name is Lilith.  She tells me she’s from Jersey.  She tells me there’s not much else I need to know.  Lilith.  The name suggests she has a soul, but where she hides it is a complete mystery.  I roll completely on my side, rest my elbow on the mattress, my head in my hand, and watch her.  She’s fallen into a soundless slumber, resting like the dead.  She lies on her back, her neck loped to one side, elegant streams of her hair covering her face and throat.  She tells me she only wants to know about me.  Nothing else matters.
I reach out casually and touch her hair, careful not to let my fingers linger and meet her skin.  Her hair is the color of soft autumn leaves, young trees, an earthy wooden shade of brown.  When I slide it between my fingers, it feels like melted chocolate.
She’s no angel, this one.  No devil.  She rests between both.  A cold mockery of assumed innocence.  A fallen angel?
I turn onto my other side, and gingerly sit up.  Though not sudden, my vision nearly blacks and I feel faint.  My head pounds like a hangover, though I still taste the Jack on my tongue, the fire in my lungs from freebasing all night.  I get to my feet and my legs feel a thousand-times longer than I know they are.  I’m not sure how I make it to my bathroom.  Almost instantaneously I’m on my knees; my legs just give out.  Is it a sign for me to pray?  To give in to god?
No.  I have to puke.
Nothing comes up but bits of red liquid that looks like blood.  Is my stomach shot?  Are my guts rotting?  I feel fragile and tormented and uncomfortable in my skin.  What happened?  I’m drinking more than I have before, trying to replace the comfort the blow takes away.  But is the comfort ever there when I’m strung-out?  I’m not who I think I am.  Who I’m supposed to be.  I’m feeling frail and weak and I’m twenty-three years old.  I’m supposed to be on top of the world.  Someone took me to the very top, and threw me right off.
Maybe it was Lilith.
The dry-heaving stops, the nausea remains, and I stumble to my feet.  I use the edge of the sink for support.  My muscles are diminished, loose ribbons.  Useless.  The mirror reveals all of the things I’ve ever done wrong.  Head nearly dropped to my chest, eyes rimming with tears, I gaze into the mirror.  All I see is death.  It shows who I was, how I’ve changed, how I can never go back…
I have lost so much weight.  I don’t ever eat when I’m wasted like this.  My skin is yellow, if not grey.  My eyes are sunk into the back of my head and my smile has disappeared.  I dress my body up with professional button-down shirts and cover it with being defensive just to get through.  Isn’t life grand?
I don’t know why, but I feel the need to call my father.  It’s late, I know.  I don’t care.  I dial his number, wait three rings until he picks up with a groggy greeting.  With his voice, I see a thousand shadows dance through my mind.  Such haunted memories, I nearly slam down the receiver right then to make it stop.
“Hello?”  Another bleary response.
I could taste a dozen things floating on the tip of my tongue, but when it comes to actually saying the words aloud, it feels like I’ve swallowed a rock.
“Adam.”  His voice carries false concern.
I clear my throat and start off asking how he is with no real interest in an answer.  I’m trying to be a polite son.  If I were honest, I would not ask something so simple.  Instead, I would say something both of us could relate to.  My father and I have never been the ones for pleasantries.  We’ve never been ones for hiding our disdain for each other.
I don’t bother waiting for an answer, and quickly hang up, then rip the jack from the wall.  I go to my bedroom, around to Lilith’s side of the bed, and yank that cord out as well.  I pull the batteries from both our cell phones.  Would it have been so bad to talk to my father?  Instead I cut me and Lilith off so no one can reach us, and we can reach no one.  I’m paranoid of someone getting a hold of us, someone finding out how fucked up we really are right now.
“Babe?”  I glance at her, dropping her phone.  I mumble something at her, telling her I’m listening, without having to use the energy to speak with her.  “Were you talking to me?”
“No, Lily.  I was talking to Dale.”
She pauses and sits up, and my eyes fall her to throat.  Perfect.  I remember hearing in my college mythology course that the ancient Greeks called ‘dere’, which refers to the front of the neck, or the throat, and it is the most beautiful, the most vulnerable, part of a woman’s anatomy.  In the throat pulses life and breath…  She snaps my attention to her eyes.  “Why must you call your father by his first name?”
I feel like a child, trapped by this woman.  Needing to run from her.  Why run?  She’s only asking quiet questions.  It is not some stranger prying for information.  This is Lilith, my friend, my girlfriend, of what is it?  Two years now?  I walk over to the door to flee, but I feel her fire topaz eyes on me, and need to respond.  “Lilith, Dale is only a father when it comes to my genes.”
She giggles.  “I like your genes.  Off!”
I smirk a little and look at her over my shoulder.  “Not those genes, Lily.”
I’m smiling when I walk away from her to living room of my apartment, and lie on the couch.  I want to sleep, but my mind races like an Olympian at the sound of the gun.  I try not to focus on Dale…my father…
I heard once that the only way to truly be alive is to confront your own mortality.  So is that what I’m doing?  I roll onto my side and my eye catches the coffee table.  I can’t even see the black wood of it anymore, it’s completely lined with bottles, empty bindles, E tablets, and cigarette ashes, all covered with a thin white dusting.  Like snow.  I stop and stare.  There’s hardly enough for a bump.  A part of me says no.  The other screams yes.  A scream that reminds me so vividly of Lilith.
Just as I move toward the table, I really do hear Lilith screaming.  Something hammers in my heart; it feels like worry, like the devil’s lie again.  I trip on my way over to her.  “Adam,” she cries.  Her eyes are rimmed with red, her hair is suddenly wild.  She sits up in the bed, and I rush into her open arms.  God knows why she’s so upset.  She was calm only moments ago.  Maybe she’s still wired…maybe she saw something only monsters such as us are able to see.
Lilith.  My beautiful little fallen angel.  It just occurs to me as she sobs that I want nothing to do with her.  It’s nothing personal.  I mean she’s a sweet girl.  As much as I’m a sweet guy.
It feels like the skin on my chest is ripping as I try to pull away from her.  She tells me that she loves me.  For some reason, I sound utterly honest as I say I love her too.  Wasn’t I just about to kick her out?  Fucking blow.  Nothing makes sense anymore.
I curl up next to her on the bed, again lying on my side, simply watching.  It seems as though she’s asleep before I can even try to relax.  My mind is spinning, my chest feels like it’s breaking, my ribcage shattering.  Somewhere in the background, I have the sickly feeling my father knows I’m strung-out, and has called the cops.
I dash to the door, making sure it’s locked, the deadbolt shifted into place, the chain slid to guard me.  I walk back to the living room.  The drugs call to me.  I answer, of course.  My eyes gaze over the chaos of the scene.  I can’t help but to smile.  Ah, I think.  My friends, the devils.
Using a nearby razorblade, I cut the rest of the coke into a small line.  Not enough to smoke, not enough to inject.  I resort to snorting.  It feels awful and delightful all at the same time, and I roll onto my back, and watch the sporadic thoughts race through my mind.  It’s getting bad.  It was only a bump.  A bump, plus the 8-balls…I’ve forgotten.  A thought occurs to me, and I snatch up the E, laughing literally outloud because ecstasy is also known as Adam.  Me and the E, we’re destined.
I pop one down, and flop back on the ground.
It feels like I’m dying.
The E has brought down the paranoia, the insanity.  Some.
I think of my father, the bastard.  I think of my mother, so beautiful, so young.  I think of Lacey, my first lover.  I think she has two kids now…  I think of Lilith.  The little fallen angel girl.  I think of her hair, her skin.  Since that night in the bar, she’s wanted me.  I’ve never understood why.  She’s wanted my body, my heart, but more…my soul.  I know nothing of her.  I want to know everything.  If I could move, I would go to her.
But I can’t move.  I think I’ve over-dosed.  I’ve over-dosed on sleeping pills and vodka before.  It wasn’t like this.  I’ve over-dosed on blow and Jack before.  It wasn’t like this.  I’m utterly immobile; my body is useless.  But a part of my mind is coherent.  The E seems to have separated my essence from my body.  I feel like a bystander.
The apartment is like a grave.  This road has to have an end.  I just don’t know where it is.  I almost think about bucking down and praying to god.  If I believed in a god, I would.  I have so much more I want to do.  But here I am, all but comatose in my living room, stark-naked, powder on my nostrils.  What would they think of me?  I could pray, tell god I’d be a saint, if only he just let me live.  And aren’t we all like that?  As our life flashes in front of our eyes, we always find ourselves saying something falsehearted like, “God, if you get me outta this one, I’ll stop (insert lie) forever.”
It could have been minutes, it could have been hours, it could have been days, weeks, for all I knew.  I see the sun rising through my blinds.
I hear Lilith stirring in the other room.
I get to my feet.  She never likes to be alone when she wakes up.  I’m standing above her when she opens her eyes.  They widen.  I wonder what I look like to her.  She tells me to come to bed.  I rest beside her.  She whispers that she loves me.  Maybe it’s not a devil’s lie.  Maybe it’s just a lie.
I tell her I love her too.