My head pounds as though it will explode when I open my eyes. There are footsteps, shuffling forcefully against the carpet, and clinking glass and crinkling plastic. I sit up slowly, my head heavy and rolling on my shoulders like an enormous ball of stone. I hold my face up with my hand, licking my sticky lips to moisten them. My face scrunches with a mix of disgust and confusion when I encounter something salty and dried up on my lips. My body feels strange. I hear the tinkling glass turn into the pounding noise of many bottles hitting the ground at once. I looked up to the sight of my boyfriend. He held a trash bag as he looked down at me, his face alive with rage.

“Everything alright, babe?” I inquire, my spinning vision making it difficult to focus on his face. I hold the sides of my head, but the spinning won’t stop.

“Is everything alright?” His scornful tone rips into me and I lift my eyes back up to him. “I wake up to find you naked on the couch, knowing that I never fucked you last night, and you have the gall to ask if I’m alright? Who was it? Or do you not even remember?” He twists his face into a mask of anger and disgust. His knuckles whiten from the tight grip he has around the mouth of the trash bag he held.

“I…” I close my eyes, trying to remember the night before.

All I remember is climbing the counter to reach my bottle and popping some pills. I barely recollected falling onto the couch to sleep, though even then I’d been alone.

“So you don’t even remember whoring yourself out, then.” He lets the bag of bottles go, turning his back to me. “I want you out. I can’t be with someone that I can’t trust.”

He turns away, the scathing glare he gave lingering behind. Somehow, I’m too numb to be hurt.

I can’t bring myself to get up at first, but I eventually drag myself off of the couch. I gather a few things, get dressed, and leave the apartment. My face through the rearview mirror draws my eyes. I see the trail of dried semen on my lips. As I try to scrub it away with my fingernails, I lean against my seat. What I would give to remember the night before...

I want to talk to someone, and Digitalis probably knows what happened when I blacked out.

“Did you see me with anyone last night?” I message her. I wait for a moment, every second that passes becoming heavier and heavier. Finally, I get her response.

“Where are you?” She asks.

“In my car, outside of the apartment.” I answer. There’s a few minutes of silence where I can do nothing but worry. What happened? I did drugs last night. Since when did I stoop back down to doing drugs? I got so wasted that my face is still a little numb. I woke up with no clothes on, semen still on my lips. She came through the door when I was studying myself, her red hair stark against the white brick of the building. She entered my car quickly, her eyebrows pinched together as though she had a headache.

“What’s going on, Asya?” She asked, licking her fingers to wipe away the smeared lipstick on her chin. I stare at the dark dashboard, my mind searching for memories that are lost to me.

“I was wondering… If you saw me with anyone last night.” I couldn’t stop glancing at myself in the mirror, my eyes fixed on the dried line leading out of my lips.

“I didn’t. Why?” She barely even looked at me, distractedly fussing with her messed up makeup.

“I woke up like I’d slept with someone the night before. My clothes were gone and… I felt like something probably happened.”

Even when I avoided my reflection, the leftover taste of the salt on my lips was a reminder. Something had tainted my mouth.

Digitalis laughed lightly.

“Maybe you fooled around a bit with one of the guys. There were a lot of hot ones there.” Her face remained affixed on the mirror she gazed into. I looked down into my lap.

“My boyfriend broke up with me. He wants me out of his apartment.” I state the words numbly.

I knew that I should be torn apart from the heartbreak of it. We’d been together for a while, and he was the only man that I’d ever had an actual relationship with. Somehow, though, I felt nothing at all. I could only wonder what happened when I was drunk. It seemed strange that I would have cheated on Marcus, even drunk. I’d never even been tempted to.

“Ah, don’t worry about him. I’ll talk some sense into him. It’s not like he hasn’t fooled around behind your back.” She was putting on new lipstick now. Her eyes focused on nothing but her face.

I should have been hurt that he’d cheated on me, but I wasn’t surprised at all.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

“Don’t bother.” I muttered, driving her home.

I just wanted to go to my studio apartment and be alone. I wasn’t in the mood to have my feelings ignored this way.

I came home to my music studio apartment for the first time in months. I flick on the lights, confronted with the furniture that had greeted me when I first came home from rehab. Bags of groceries disguise numerous bottles of liquor. I didn’t want to give the door guard anything to tell Gael.

I immediately slid into the shower, drinking from a bottle I smuggled in. My skin seemed filthy, worse than any other morning that I woke from a party. Something was wrong with me, and I scrubbed my lip before I took a swig from the bottle. I thought about how I woke undressed and some frustrated tears mixed with the shower water. I remembered that I had a meeting in the studio today when my phone’s alarm sang from the bathroom counter where I’d left it. I dressed as quickly as I could and rushed downstairs. My head was dizzy from the liquor buzz I got, but I had no time to sober up.

Gael was alone in the room when I got there, so I must have been early. He looked up at me, studying me. My hair was still dripping, eyes red from the night before. He gave me a look of concern before he approached me. Face to face, I wanted to hold my breath. His powerful gaze made me feel small.

“You’ve been drinking.” He states, sighing with disappointment.

“I uh… Had a birthday party last night. We drank a little. I guess it just hasn’t worn off yet.” I scratch the back of my neck, giving him a sheepish grin.

He doesn’t buy it. His eyes are as disapproving as they were when he noticed the scent of liquor on my breath.

“If you relapse, Asya, I’ll put you right back into rehab.” Gael starts toward his place at the meeting table, straightening some papers he would use for the meeting.

I nod my head; the grin sticking to my lips like a mask. I sat down and stared at my hands. The silence between us only watered the blossoms of shame that spread within me.

My apartment is a bleak, empty expanse as I spend my next week alone. When I was with my boyfriend, I would drink all day. Yet, it wouldn’t seem so dead as it did when I drank in my apartment. Knowing that he would return home lifted some dreariness away. I wouldn’t have that anymore, and that was all I had to grieve over for our breakup.

The apartment was dark because I was too apathetic to flip any of the lights on. Even the furniture and decorations didn’t weren’t mine, merely props selected by the studio’s interior designers. I sat at my computer, going through fan mail to keep Gael off of my back. A part of me wondered if reading their letters might take some loneliness away, but somehow, it remained.

Over and over, each letter followed a pattern. It usually started with a proclamation of how much the fan loved me. Often, they stated the number of years they knew my music. Then, they would tell me about their favourite song or the moment they knew that they were a ‘true fan’. The letters often finished with a question about future music, the meaning of old music, or a personal question about myself. I gave them brief answers when appropriate before tagging on one of a handful of appreciative thank you’s for their affection.

Then I found one that was different. It was brief, only two sentences long, with a video link inside. “This is floating around. You haven’t seen it yet, have you?” I clicked the link.

My screen is invaded by the image of my ex-boyfriend’s apartment. I’m lying on the couch, my eyes lost looking and only partially open. I appear as though I’d been roofied. A strange man approaches me and I can’t see his face. He’s positioned with his back towards the camera. His pale brown hair is short, and the way he walks is strange, creepy.

I squint at the screen, wishing that I knew what was going to happen.

He speaks to the person holding the camera, asking that they hold it steady. I can see his eyes, as black as night despite the room’s light.

I freeze at the sight of his eyes.

He pulls his pants down and he undresses me slowly.

There’s a sensation like I’m floating outside of myself. I’m barely anchored by my body, still sitting and watching the video without the ability to avert my eyes. It is mind-numbingly slow to watch, though the timestamp on the screen boasts that only a minute has passed. The muffled noises I can hear beneath the static are deafening to me, as though the louder sound of voices and shuffling feet weren’t there at all. In the video, I groan.

I hold my breath. I want to close my eyes, but I can’t stop watching. Instead, they remain wide open, watered by the gentle tears that climb out of my eyes. The distressed expression on my inebriated face tears at me. I am helpless here, and I am helpless again as a viewer. There are strange feelings on my skin where I saw his hands on me, ugly phantom hands that seem to reach into my skin.

Finally, he lets me go and clothes himself, turning the camera off.

I stare at the blackness of my screen with a pure and raw wrenching inside of me. Tears stream down my face and I can’t move my eyes away from their reflections. I can’t stop thinking about the video and briefly I remember the man’s face from the night it happened; The way he looked down at me with those black eyes, as though he would devour me whole. I shake in my chair, forcing myself to get up. It’s as though I’ve aged, and my body will snap and break when I go to the kitchen.

I need a bottle, just one. I need to wash this all away; to forget what I saw and live my life confused instead. There’s nothing for me in the cabinets, though. I push food onto the floor, desperately searching for just a drop. My hands are shaking violently by the time I’ve cleared my kitchen out. I’m on the verge of a complete breakdown when I spot it: one of Digitalis’ pill bottles.

I crawl to it in a hurry, praying that there’s even just one pill inside. I wrench it open, relieved to find that it’s filled to the brim.

A momentary memory pops into my head of the man from the screen, so much stronger than I was.

I don’t count the pills I crush on the floor before I inhale them. The powder buries it all away inside of me, where I hope for it to stay. The euphoria fills me and for just a minute; I’m no longer weighed down and empty, like a broken automaton. For just a minute, it’s almost like I’m someone again, even if that someone isn’t really me. I might even handle the emptiness within me as this person…

Then, I’m melting into the floor and my eyes close.