Chris II

Hello again.

I’m lucid today. By that, I mean I’m able to keep myself in the present now. I don’t have to think about the intricacies of the universe and how it all fits. For example, I’ve been thinking about how the universe is expanding. One must ask what is it expanding into. Is it nothing, space that has yet to exist? Is there space outside the universe it can expand to? It’s a good question, but one that doesn’t make sense if one thinks deeply about it.

It bugs me deeply because the answer is undefined. By definition, the universe is all of existence. If it is expanding, it is expanding unto itself, an intrinsic property of itself. However, if the universe is finite and there is something outside, the answer becomes unknown as we are bound by the observable universe.

But what bothers me more is that I instinctively know these possibilities are both true. For one, I know you are the observer and second, the universe I reside in is infinite through my perspective. Perhaps this question is too much for a simple third-dimensional being like myself.

But you don’t want to hear about that, do you?

So let me tell you what I’m doing.

Emily coughs up the smoke she ripped out of the bong. We were all supposed to meet at her place but I was the only one who showed up. I suppose I should count Grace, after all wherever Emily goes she takes Grace with her now. Like you, I also know the only reason Emily ever became her friend was out of pity. Emily just wants to make herself feel good. Grace isn’t dumb either, naive, but not dumb. I suspect she knows too. Either way, the why won’t end up mattering. A genuine friendship is forming between the two, just like Emily and Elizabeth.

“Fuck,” Emily continues to cough.

“Does it hurt?” Grace asks.

“No, I just smoked too much,” Emily continues.

“How does being high feel?”

I look up at Emily’s bedroom ceiling. Like the treehouse, it’s covered in polaroids. All mementos of times when we were all naive. Emily hasn’t taken a single photo since the suicide. She’s no longer the Ems I grew up with.

“Do you want to try?”

Grace nods.

There it is. The pull of the universe. It’s maddening; telling me to stop it without ever telling me why. Like the observer being able to see ahead, past, present, and future whenever you wish. I ask you why is it telling me Grace’s nod isn’t the correct choice.

But I cannot hear you.

What makes Grace so special that this instinct keeps happening whenever I’m around her? It happened Emily introduced her to us, it happened the night she got drunk with us and it’s happening again, right here.

It’s giving me a choice. Grace isn’t destined to smoke right here and now. I can see that.

But I don’t stop it.

What does it mean to have a will?

She coughs up a storm, much worse than Emily ever did. Emily gets up from the floor to grab bottled water from her nightstand and gives it to the little girl.

“First time’s always rough,” she chuckles.

“My mouth feels so dry.”

“Cottonmouth. Drink some water.”

“So when does it kick in?”

“Give it a few. Chris, want some?”

Emily hands me the bong and I stare at it for a moment. I used to enjoy being high. It would calm my racing thoughts and make me lucid. Now, all it does is make me anxious.

The trick to minimizing the effects of smoking is to not actually inhale the smoke. Afterward, you exhale when the least amount of people are watching. This way the thick white smoke isn’t as noticeable compared to the light gray that exits the lungs.

“Whoa,” Grace coughs a bit. “It’s like an invisible blanket is covering me.

Emily giggles, “First time?

“Are you sure you want to do this?” I speak up for the first time.

“Come on Chris, we were like 12 when we first smoked. How old are you again, Gracie?”

“Fourteen.”

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“See?”

“The sheep often get led astray without a shepherd.”

“Oh don’t talk in riddles like Cody, you bitch,” Emily rolls her eyes.

“My eyes feel funny,” Grace laughs.

We end up taking Grace home after she smokes a bit more than she can handle. Emily has me carrying the sleeping girl through her house and into her bed.

“Oh look, she’s finally decorating her room since last I was here. It used to be so bland.”

Grace’s room looks like any other to me. It’s not like I can have many comparisons. Mine is probably the blandest out of anyone. I don’t have a need for many materialistic things so there isn’t much. But Grace and everyone else does, so it makes their rooms feel foreign to me. There isn’t much to like in a girl’s room in the first place so I don’t comment on it and take one last look before I leave. The only thing that catches my eye is the curtains. They’re pretty.

Emily doesn’t immediately start her car instead choosing to stare at her phone screen for a while. “You think I’m over my head?”

“With what?”

“Andrew.”

I don’t say anything. It’s not my place. It’s situations like these where the pull would be useful. It could guide me and tell me what the right choice for Emily would be. Instead, it’s another pull is happening right here, not towards Emily but my own. It’s the most common.

It wants me somewhere today.

Should I listen?

Okay, I will.

“So you’re not going to say anything?” Emily slams her head against the headrest. “you're like my brother and won’t even have the decency to tell me I’m an idiot,” she groans under her breath.

“You are an idiot, but I rather not talk about it.”

“Why?”

“Because you already know what to do.”

Emily sighs and covers her face with her arms in frustration. “Want to go to the park and smoke some more? I need to clear my head.”

The park. That’s where I need to be.”

“Yeah.”

Emily restlessly moves her legs toward the top of the hill in the park. She’s been anxious all day. Regular friends would talk about what she should do between Andrew and her. But that’s not what she’s actually anxious about. I can tell by her jagged micromovements that something happened between Cody and her. I had a feeling things would end up like this. Cody has never been good at processing his emotions. They only confuse him and lead him astray when he pursues things without a thought. Emily is the opposite. She knows what she wants but is always too afraid to never have it.

She fell in love with a con artist, a pretty grifter with a silver tongue and fast hands. And he fell in love with a vulture, always picking skin until she’s left with skeletons; a life of always getting scraps.

“Do you have any molly on you?” She asks.

I shake my head and sit next to her.

This is the first time I actually listened to what the universe wanted me to do and it feels empty. There’s nothing special. There’s no one at the park, the streets are quiet and the sun is setting down. Do you know why it brought me here?

“What’s with you? You never have shit anymore.”

“I stopped.”

“Stopped?” Emily’s flabbergasted.

There was a time when doing those drugs would pull me out of my head. It’s why I did them. They’re fun, I’m not going to lie to you. Coke makes me feel like a normal human. MDMA connects me to the world and makes me understand it. Mushrooms and LSD give me another perspective of thinking. But I saw everything that it did to Elizabeth, how it made her feel and how she couldn’t handle it. She always wanted me to give her something better, something stronger.

Cody told me about it, how they found her using meth that she got from her disowned brother.

But a person doesn’t ruin their life chasing a high on a whim. There was an underlying issue, the one everyone wants to know about. The reason why Grace is looking into. I would like to let it go, but I would like to know too.

After all, I’m just as responsible for her death just as everyone involved.

I sat with her for her first acid trip.

“You don’t think Elizabeth’s death affected me too?”

“Oh, I didn’t know. You’re just so stoic all the time, y’know?”

“It’s alright, it’s not like I ever talk about it.”

“Want to?”

“No.”

Emily giggles. “Right. She just fucked us all up because we were shitty friends to her. Thank you for sharing, it means a lot that you did.”

As Emily smokes out of her pipe, I stare back up at the sky. I can feel the lucidity start to fade and the thoughts slowly creep into my mind. The question of consciousness, the implications of destined free will, what it means to be.

I look down so these thoughts hopefully end and you don’t get bombarded with them. A side effect of losing touch with reality is hallucinations without psychedelics.

A woman walks across the field down from us. She’s dressed in all black and it heavily contrasts her almost angel-like white hair. Even her skin is just as white. Emily hasn’t noticed her or at least commented on it. It's not real.

“You asked me before if you were over your head with Andrew, right?” I ask anything to keep my mind occupied.

But it’s like a drum, slowly getting louder and louder. A ringing beat keeps pounding my head.

“Hmm?” Emily exhales.

“Ems, what you’re doing is just a retaliation towards Cody’s stupidity.”

“And what of it? Maybe it'll push him to take things seriously now. At least with Andrew I don't have to think about it. "

The sound of the drum is coming from my own heart. It’s banging against my ribcage trying its hardest to burst out.

“Do you actually like him?”

“Yeah, sort of. I get it now, why so many girls end up liking him too even though-”

I don’t hear the rest of it. My entire field of view blackens out except for what is right in front of me; the woman walking across the park. Her strides are short and slow and she’s looking at the ground.

The beat of my heart only accelerates.

The woman stops and looks up.

“Ems,”

The woman looks in front of her.

“Do you see her?”

The woman turns her head and looks at me.

“See who?”

Her eyes are also as white as the rest of her body. Her eyes don’t let go. Her head tilts and then smiles.

“Oh,” Emily snaps, bringing my vision back. “She’s really pretty.”

All the pressure I've been feeling dissipates as if was never there, to begin with. I wasn’t hallucinating the woman.

The woman with the white hair turns her head forwards and continues to walk.

Forward, always forward.