An Exercise in Self-Loathing

The car sits at an intersection, her hands flexing around the wheel. Her hold has been white knuckled, and now there’s a tenseness to the joints of her fingers curled around the familiar grip. She stares vacantly, unseeingly, at the road ahead, the car rumbling louder the longer she idles. Her body is humming, and she’s not sure if it’s electricity, or nausea, or a deep yawning chasm of “What the fuck have I done?” There’s a honk behind her and she startles, finally noticing the green light above her and starting forward just as it turns yellow. She winces for the people behind her, hands tightening anxiously on the steering wheel again.

There was a group of them, and they went out. Normal, so normal. But she wasn’t, spinning even more than usual beneath the fragile covering of her pottery skin. It had mattered why at the beginning of the night. The bar wasn’t the kind she preferred on her own, crowded and well lit, but she was happy to go where the group wanted and abdicate responsibility for the choice, happy for the distraction of people and alcohol. She knew she wasn’t in the right mood to get drunk, knew how stupid it was to pull her ugliness inside out in front of people she had to see again, wanted to see again— But she also knew she didn’t want to think anymore. She hardly hesitated as she set out to drink herself away.

She was at the bar, her hand on some stranger’s thigh – drinking like she was was almost a punishment, but there were other ways to hurt herself too. The group had dwindled as the hours passed, but the people who were left were the ones she was closest to, even if she’d been too impatient to sit with them and wait for the waiter to refill her drink. Even if she was perched on a barstool with her hand on a stranger’s thigh instead. Her favourite came up behind her – taking too long – and she stumbled climbing to her feet in her haste to remove her hand unseen, his hand catching her elbow, steadying.

“Come have a smoke with me,” he said. His face was the same as it always was to her, but still she felt her own lack of subtlety rubbing against her skin; he’d seen her.

She held his eyes longer than she would have if she was sober. “Okay.”

“Hey—!” the stranger at the bar tried, half-rising from their seat in anger, but he didn’t hesitate the way she would have, pulling her along behind him out of reach, as if her mistakes didn’t exist. She liked to try and pretend as much, but the voices (her own) whispering invectives in her head rarely allowed her.

He took her out the back entrance, into an alleyway still wet with rain that had passed while they’d been indoors, the presence of the garbage bins next to them lending more of her preferred atmosphère. He didn’t reach for his smokes and she didn’t ask, wrapping her arms around herself and avoiding his eyes.

“What’re you doing?” he said. It didn’t sound like a question. She wasn’t sure if it was accusation in his eyes or her own shame looking back at her.

“Nothing,” she said automatically, and felt like a teenager; stupid, and young, and a terrible liar.

“What’s wrong?” he tried again, taking a step closer with his hands held out peacefully, as if she might’ve spooked.

She supposed she did look like she might’ve, but she didn’t feel close to it. She felt angry, in need of a fight (something, anything). Her nerves jangled, jittered, jumped beneath her skin, moving pinpricks needling into her. Cornered, more seen than she liked to be, and stripped of the pain she’d arranged for herself. “How is it any of your business?” she snapped. (—knew he didn’t deserve it.)

“You’re my friend,” he said, and watched her curdle in on herself. He hated her eyes. Like black reflecting pools, large and dark in her face; too old for her, too expressive for anyone.

She rubbed her face – drunk, too drunk by half to have this conversation – and drew in a deep breath of air, blowing it out when her cheeks could no longer contain their chipmunk swell. “You’re my friend too,” she said, instead of something she didn’t mean. He was closer than he usually was, and she wanted to melt into him, let herself lose shape and definition and borrow his.

“Would you stop hurting yourself if I asked?” he said, not letting her eyes escape his.

She felt like she lost a part of herself when she finally managed to pull her gaze away, directing it to her feet as she laughed humourlessly, while something that had once been hers buzzed fruitlessly against his flypaper eyes. “No,” she said, the word small and lost and true. She thought about being better sometimes. But she didn’t know what to fight for.

His hand hovered in the air near her, hesitating; usually he was so casual with his touches, and she hadn’t known what she wanted the new difference to mean. Maybe all it had meant was that he’d been afraid of her reaction if he reached for her; she wasn’t short on volatility when trying to escape herself. Then his fingers closed the distance, soft as they brushed the edge of her cheek and took her face in his hand. She wanted, this endless esurient need inside her. But she didn’t want absolution if the price was destroying him.

He didn’t know when she’d become an itch, but she was one. Her tremulous, unconvincing smile had a pull on his feelings that he didn’t care to overanalyse.

“Can I have a cigarette now?” she asked, shaky as she forced the heavy air to dissipate.

He chuckled, movements smooth and familiar as he fished his pack from a pocket. She didn’t smoke by herself, but she liked being around him. He lit his own cigarette before offering her the pack, and she couldn’t help but smile over him and his mannerisms, trying to hide the curve of her lips against her shoulder. She watched their feet next to each other, cigarette balanced between two fingers and smoke curling in the air. They talked easily, about nothing, and his regard wrapped around her like the sun, warm and golden. Sometimes she almost thought he could’ve been enough to save her, but she knew truth was more complicated than hazy visions of “what could be” hanging in cigarette smoke.

She was fine until he put his arm jocularly around her shoulders, everything pausing beneath the steadying weight. She couldn’t have explained the impulse, then or now, that made her turn and look up at him the way she did, naked and entirely too direct. There was no thought behind it, no voice screaming in her head to stop.

“Can I kiss you?” she asked simply.

He was amused, in retrospect likely because it was the easiest emotion to handle. “You always ask for the green light first? Where’s the unexpected in that kind of life?”

“I don’t know,” she said, and kissed him anyway, his arm around her shoulders drawing her closer. For a moment, she felt right; the kiss wasn’t at all like she usually kissed, soft and uncertain, and he’d always inspired an unusual feeling of safety. She had feelings for him, when she usually questioned if she was capable of as much. But then her thoughts crashed back in. She felt him kiss her back and the guilt of it sank, sank, and then settled so deeply into her stomach she knew it would never come out again. Her rot began to spread to him, fouling putrefaction passing from her lips, her shoulders, her hip where he had a hand, over to him. Her selfishness was as the heat death of a universe (user, devourer of worlds—). She pulled away before he did, not sure if she was going to vomit or asphyxiate, pressure suffusing her chest, and her eyes caught on the band around his finger.

He might’ve tried to say something – she hated the part of herself that wanted him to have tried to stop her – but she didn’t hear it as she fled.

The night is late, and the car sits at an empty intersection. Her grip on the wheel is angry, terrified, and she glares at the green light above her like it has anything to do with what’s wrong with her.

“Fuck.”

Her hands rake through her hair, nails digging into her scalp though the pain does little to ground her. “Fuck,” she says again, quieter.