Page 118 of Ecstasy
Maybe she wants someone to try and save her, after all. Save her with violence and threats and cruel words.
Someone tonot accept her for the fucked-up mess that she is.
If that’s what she fucking wants, I can give her that, too.
37
Zara
September fades into October.
I see Alex sometimes around campus, laughing and joking with his friends. I see him at lunch when I meet Kylie. He looks my way sometimes, but he doesn’t speak. Doesn’t wave.
We haven’t spoken since he left the beach house.
Dwight drove me home. Asked me about Alex. I didn’t tell him anything.
I hear about Eli, but I guess our schedules don’t line up because thankfully, I don’t see him. I hear he’s done really well at all of his matches. It’s all I hear of him.
Praise.
He doesn’t try to contact me.
I guess the game the three of us played really is over.
No one won after all.
Sometimes, I’ll rub my thumb over my hip, and I’ll remember it.
I remember his words from that time he came to my apartment, “Those scars are beautiful, baby girl. “
I guess I really was just a distraction for him. A game for him to play.
Now, Jax and Kylie and my professors are the extent of my social interactions, and I avoid the latter as much as possible. I go to class, slink out, do my work in an Adderall-induced haze, glug down cough syrup and go to sleep.
I’m responsible though. Wednesdays I don’t take anything. Wednesdays are to reset.
Wednesdays are fucking trash.
I also try to get to the little park that edges campus every day. The weather is turning cool, and it’s nice being outside for it.
A few of my old friends from ECU text me sometimes, asking me to come down for parties. I still don’t have a car. Or a job. I still don’t want to get one.
I’m doing a paper on Epictetus, a slave-turned-philosopher who said, “You cannot learn that which you think you already know,” but I kind of wish I could hold a séance and ask him what happens when you don’t think you know shit and you still don’t learn a damn thing.
I don’t know shit.
I’m not learning.
Seems like a good Stoic philosophy, always being open to wisdom because you know nothing. Turns out, though, it’s not helpful in my everyday life. I don’t think I’ll ever learn.
Two Fridays before Halloween, I shoulder my bag after leaving a seminar on ancient Greek philosophy, hands jammed in the pockets of my black and white zebra-striped hoodie. A gift from my mother that I actually really love.
We’re talking again, and she seems happy.
That’s good, I guess. But I kind of just don’t care about much of anything. The high I felt after that night with Eli and Alex before it all went to shit, it’s long gone. And not even the drugs can get it back. But I keep doing them anyway, hopeful they’ll spark something in me.
I’ve got my hood over my head as a light mist descends upon campus, and I’m not really paying any attention to where I’m going, just staring at my black wedged boots, when I almost walk right into a fucking light pole.
