coming down
by RF

A ten foot chain link fence runs parallel to the road. It casts crisscross shadows over my skin; mocking black exes that create of me, a hypocrite. When I breath, the air feels like liquid, and when I speak, I can taste the diesel that saturates it. The sun seems strange today. The world looks cold as ice, varnished with a deceiving silver glare.

It’s too hot to be strung out. Too hot to be coming down, too hot to have stopped somewhere beautiful when my mind refuses to function, and all I can feel is a tongue of sandpaper and a full-bodied twitch.

I don’t remember when the chain link fence slipped away behind me, or exactly how long I’ve been treading black soles to faded pavement, but somewhere along the way, the shadows have started to stretch, like greedy fingers, out onto the street. A corner of the sky is growing dark, but the white hot sun still seems to have bled all color dry.

Everything seems parched and frail, dehydrated, as though a single touch and it would all crumble into dust. It leaves me with a strange sense of solitude that threatens to crack open the sidewalk beneath my feet and swallow me, but only up to my knees, leaving bloody stumps in it’s wake. Solitude is like that; death by slow bleed, never as quick and clean as being swallowed whole.

The silence finds me with my eyes to the little dark screen of my cell once again. It must be the tenth time I’ve checked it, that I remember. Yet if I were why, I don’t believe I could give an answer. I didn’t think I was waiting for his call, and if I am, well god knows I’ll be waiting ‘till the day the ocean and the sky trade places. The last we had spoken, too many words were exchanged between us that can never be put to rest. I thought that what I wanted was to end it all; to sever the thread of mindfucks and torture that we always seemed to strangle each other with. But he looked at me as though I had given him the kiss of Judas, and when he left, I realized that a part of me had left as well.

I play with the phone, turning it around in my hand as I play with the idea of calling him. I need to feel his skin beneath my hands, to taste his lips, to feel his heat. I feel powerless, dismembered.

I wonder if I’ve gone too far this time, if I’ll die in this tiny town on a gravel road amid corn and wheat, just a few miles from the tour bus. I wonder if they’re looking for me.

I should have thought to bring something to drink. But thoughts themselves have become too much like liquid to be of any use these days.

Taking a seat on the side of the road, I wonder briefly, when it was that the sidewalk had vanished as well, and stare down at the cell phone cradled in my hand. Slowly, my finger begins the sequence.

The phone rings once, twice. I force myself to breath through what feels like a straw, and wipe the burning sweat away from my eyes.

Silence. A few seconds stretch like an eternity.

“Hello?”

“Brian...” I nearly choke on my own voice. “I’m sorry.”