Member-only story
Gabriella in Repose
Prose
I watch her through hooded eyes as she takes another smattering of pills in her hand. I don’t think of anything — my own mind’s muddled from the drugs I just took myself — but all I want to do is lie back and cuddle against her in this moment.
But she won’t let me. She is hollow-eyed as she sits there, tracing the veins along her skin as if she’s afraid she’s a ghost that’s moving through one too many doorways.
Gabriella — my lovely, sweet, soft Gabriella — closes her eyes and lets out a puff of breath. It’s enough to make her hair flutter from its hanging position in front of her face.
Then she lies back on the bed, and I crawl over to her, and I press my face against her stomach to breathe her in. She smells like fresh laundry and citrus soap.
“Get off,” she murmurs, pushing at my shoulders, but I feel dizzy.
“No,” I respond, and we lie like that for a while, just breathing in each other’s presence even though I know we’re both falling down a rabbit hole from which there’s no escape.
The drugs have us.
Far more than we have each other.
Another prose experiment, this time about Gabriella and her drug-addled boyfriend as they spend one weekend getting high away from all their friends and family.
What kind of relationship can you build from that, I wonder?
Silly questions, I suppose.
