Sadie

under water

There was a flower bed in the backyard, yellow and red, withered and wilted in the summer heat. Green stalks and stems and yellowed elephant ears preserved in rigid countenance by the sun. A still life in the evening, death in suspension. Yet, try to touch that picture and the brittle petals would crumble, the figure slipping into oblivion.

Illness spreads, from house to house, street to street, town to town. From person to person, tongue to tongue, skin-on-skin; the essence of life sifted of all its false gold and diamonds, from its excited luminous illusion, until all that is left is sand, and the ceaseless expanse, growth, multiplication of cells and life towards a nameless infinity. A body in bed, curled in white sheets. Sadie was afraid of the sun. A strand of light broke through the curtains to turn the peek of of her brown hair ancient mahogany. Nudging her gently, Sadie let out a soft cry and turned around to the other side of the bed. She didn’t want to do anything today.

–

Sadie had a problem with drinking. Also with pills and sometimes coke and sometimes men. Strange men if she had to and sometimes even if she didn’t have to. Once she went to the ER in the midst of a bender believing she was having a heart attack. Coming back mostly sober she told me the doctor could tell she was drinking because of the marks on her liver. Sadie was afraid, adamant that she’d never drink again, that she would stop that very day until after a bit of deliberation she decided they were just trying to scare her and kept on drinking and bought another eight ball.

It wasn’t a mystery how she got to be how she was, her parent’s appearance in her life was always spotty. During the weekends she was all but raised by her grandpa on crutches, and during the week even, she was left alone to walk from school, to fix her own dinner, make her own lunch. Mom and dad were addicts she told me once in confidence when we were fifteen, though I already knew, everyone already knew.

Now Sadie worked at a trashy diner across from a motel with all kinds of figures who would come in and out. As she told me some were bikers, others honest to god cowboys, but most were homeless druggies of some sort, prostitutes. She drank and smoked before all of that, but the pressure of the job she said made it all the more consuming. She said, how could she live like this without being high, how could she bear it all. Well, I didn’t quite know.

Now, she refused to get out of bed. She refused to get out of bed on one blisteringly sunny summer afternoon. She still lived with her mom and her younger brother, her father was dead, had been dead from an overdose. She didn’t like the light, it was too bright. She liked the stars and she liked electric nights. The sun, she said, was nauseating—or was it just the hangover, the regrets, the fear. I went to the kitchen where I poured whiskey in a plastic cup beside a sink filled with dishes. She drank it all in one big swig and unsteadily, her long white legs shaking, she lifted up from bed

–

Sadie had lived in the same home all her life. She wanted to leave at times—first at fourteen. Then, at eighteen, she made big plans to go away, to college maybe or somewhere. But instead she got a job, a boyfriend, and then another, and then another.

Her home’s neighborhood was, on all days of the week, lined with overfilled trash bins, rusted out cars, stray cats. The cats would look at you, stare at you, study you, before in stunning quickness disappear. They disappeared in something of an eternal cycle animating the never changing yet perpetually decaying fixtures of cars and homes and trees and trash bins. Sadie would feed the cats every evening before work and seven or nine of them would gather outside her back steps as she’d smoke a cigarette. Then, returning in the early morning hours she’d drink with which ones were left, her favorite a fat orange one named ‘Sammy’.

There was a night when we were thirteen and we were all beside a campfire. She was directly across from me in the circle, obscured by the glow emanating from the lick of orange flame. Like a mask of opaque desire hiding her until an expansive wind from somewhere unknown abated the flames and lifted the mask where her flesh was suddenly flushed with the rarest violet hue poured from the stars itself; her face in the night placed in a perfect vacuum of sense, there was no one else, only her, and everything was her, in her, in her eyes, her hair, in something unfathomable before me, a vast mysterious sea of nothingness below me, until one day it would annihilate me.

—

She was drunk again, high again, the houses and the cars and the flowers suspended in the slow infinity of a summer’s evening. She was happy, and that was sometimes all that mattered. Life, this strange thing, held entirely in a moment of bliss besides her, and otherwise unbounded, terribly, endlessly, blisteringly, perpetually searching for incomprehensible horizons.

Somewhere, on the far outskirts of her neighborhood was a slight grassy slope at a quiet intersection. We’d go there on summer evenings and sit, watch the cars in both directions and wonder where they were going. Wonder at the faces through the window, the contingency of worlds; a burst of headlights in the distance fading in the static night. Such big questions we pondered as everything large surrendered to the perfect quietude of that little place, like we were standing atop a mountain in the alps. Imagined that we were likewise at the bottom of a vast, dark ocean, or safe in a cloud, that between us was where the whole world lay in wait for one of us, or both of us, to leap into. We were still young, and nothing was yet quite real.