My Love Was My Decay

At first, it was all dark and black and he had no sense, and the next moment the inside of his eyelids turned blinding white and in the same moment all the colors of the spectrum and his nose couldn’t breathe and then all pressure released –

That all happened in less than a second. His eyes snapped open and he realised Paul had thrown a pillow from his bed at him.

He groaned. “Paul!” He tried sitting up by leaning on his elbows, but a searing pain shot through his left and he immediately collapsed back onto the bed. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Paul lean towards him and tried to make it look like he was flopping tiredly back down. Luckily all of his upper body except his face was hidden under the blanket.

“Hey, Shay,” Paul slurred. That’s when he knew Paul was drunk. Again.

“Hey…” Using his right hand, he pushed the pillow off himself. “What’s up?”

“Do you know where the bruuush is?” Paul was standing up pretty steadily but he didn’t know how long that would last for.

“Oh, yea, it’s under the kitchen sink where you left it last time.” Sure enough, the smell of vomit was slowly wafting through the open door into Shay’s room, joining the thin beams of morning sunlight poking through his shut curtains.

Paul stumbled drunkenly out of the room.

He sighed. It must’ve been, what, eight o’clock in the morning? At least. His brain fumbled with the numbers and hit rewind on the night. Paul hadn’t been home when he’d gotten home, around seven. So he’d been gone at least twelve hours, doing who knows what at who knows where.

Like a robot, numb, and his left arm in pain, he got out of bed and quickly changed clothes before Paul could barge back in.

Then, he sat down on his bed and stared blankly into space.

He had no plans. He had no feelings. He had, really, nothing anymore since she’d left. He hadn’t gone to school, hadn’t bothered to find a job, hadn’t cleaned the house, hadn’t left the city, hadn’t done anything. All he did was visit the park and walk by the school and sometimes go down the beach, when he was feeling really low, because that was the place that hurt the most.

She was wearing a cute Tommy Hilfiger anchors bikini, running through the water. She’d acquired two under-the-hair coontails, the stripes lime green on her jet-black hair. He remembered the one conversation they had when she’d told him she’d considered not dying her hair black again once it had all grown out.

“What’s your natural hair color anyways?” he’d asked her, because he’d met her when her hair was purely black.

She’d just grinned at him and stuck out her tongue. “I guess you’ll just have to wait and see.”

So much for that, now.

She retired to her black towel, spread out on the sand. She flopped down on it and slipped on her Abercrombie flip-flops. He sat down next to her.

“I wish every day could be like this.” She always got wistful when she was at the beach.

“Yeah, me too.” He wasn’t sure if she caught the double meaning on that, but if she did, she didn’t show it. “Are you thirsty?” he asked quickly. “I’m going to get something to drink.”

“Oh, sure. Just a water’s okay.”

“I’ll be right back!” He scrambled up from the sand and padded over to the snack shop.

“Hi, can I have a water bottle and a Coke?” he asked the boy at the window, who was a scrawny fourteen-year-old guy he was sure went to his school. While the boy frantically and silently grabbed the water from an unseen refrigerator, he inquired wonderingly, “Hey, don’t you go to my school?”

The boy looked up for a moment, and he was confused and agitated at why his face was so terrified. “I-I think so.” He lowered his face again and handed over the change before retreating back into the shade the snack shop awning cast on the counter.

The icy bottle burned his palms and sweated cold water onto his curved fingers, softening the paper label. He continued past the bathrooms over the sand dunes, and descended back onto the beach. Frowning, he found her towel, but she wasn’t there.

He saw her sitting next to another boy. He seemed to be about their age, maybe a year older. He had long-ish dark hair, the color indiscernible from where he was standing. It was either black or dark brown. A skateboard was dug into the sand at his feet and he was chatting away with Ashleigh.

He made his way over and at his arrival, she and the boy looked up.

“Oh, hey, Shay!” He was pleased to hear that she sounded happy to see him.

“Here’s your water.” He passed her the bottle and sat down in the sand next to her. He looked across her to the boy and said, “Hi, I’m Shay.”

He nodded to me. “Hey, I’m Brendan.”

She giggled in a way that made his eyebrows come together and the main artery of his heart start to twist.

And so the nightmare began.