The denim pocket is stiff as I pull my cell phone out of the cutoff jean shorts I’ve worn for days. I quickly swipe past the picture of us, still glowing on the background screen, and open the music app, hitting ‘shuffle’. Stretching out my legs, Sigur Ros’s “Untitled #1” plays, and I don’t change it; it’s the perfect soundtrack for this moment, and really, for how I’ve felt for so long. I put the phone down beside me and lie back on the sand, looking up at the sky, into the in-between colour states that form when night shifts into morning. The music video plays in my conscience and projects on the clouds: young children leaving a classroom for recess, zipping up their winter coats before pulling down gas masks over their tiny faces. Dissolve. Outside in the post-apocalyptic schoolyard, they’re playing in ashes falling from the red sky, like snow, and their masks sway as they dance and throw debris into the air, letting it fall around a dove, motionless. Dissolve. A hawk, which I think is another video memory, emerges through the image of the lifeless bird, but in real time; its wings aren’t flapping, and it’s not moving forward or back. It’s like I’m staring at a photograph, hanging there in the clouds, until behind me, the streetlights along the edge of the road and banks of the beach flicker off. The hawk flies towards the city, and the children are gone.
The embers of the cigarette glow against the necklace as I hold it above me in the illumination of the rising sun, and I notice a broken clasp. But the locket hasn’t fallen off. My fingers graze over the tarnished shape a few times before I open it. There’s no photo inside, and I wonder if there was, and I think of whose neck this was around—how beautiful she must be—until an overwhelming stench of rust permeates down from my hands. Letting go of the necklace, my eyes water as I cough out clouds of smoke. I roll over on my side, hyperventilating and forcing myself to breathe, and I’m almost convulsing as my eyes close. When drops hit the sand, I realize I’m not choking; I’m crying.
***
My eyelids separate, cracking like someone had glued them shut, and in a hazy focus, I see something flashing—a digital alarm clock, its glow reflecting on the surface of the ivory-white nightstand beside me. It blinks 12:00 once, then twice, and I vomit. The liquid sprays against a wall, runs down the paint, and soaks into a stained sheet on the floor.
“There’s a taste in my mouth as desperation takes hold,” Ian Curtis cries somewhere, desperate and soft.
Lying on my side, trying to wipe the strands of thick drool off my chin, a stabbing sensation radiates as something presses into my lung. The pain is so intense that I jolt my body in the opposite direction, and as I turn, my hand hits something plastic. I’m wheezing on my back as I watch a white jug roll off the edge of a bed.
