Something sweet...

His words hurt even when he's trying to be nice, when a compliment turns into a jab, when a kind word turns into an insult. It's just too late to take anything the way it's intended tonight. Making trips to 7-11 at 3am for cigarettes and something to try to scare away the hunger growing inside. The poison pulsing through their veins, a slurpee might just hit the spot.

The track marks hiding under sleeves pulled and stretched long, just to hide the scars of the recent past. The doors swing closed behind, walking down the aisles, eyeing the chips and candy, false filling, sugar and corn starch. Picking up a bag of fritos, a pack of gum, and the biggest cup of iced sugar water possible, walking together to the check stand.

The attendant has seen this a million times before. "If only I could say something, say that one thing that would get through to them... but I can't." They scrounge for change and crumpled dirty dollar bills, finding just enough to pay, having to leave the pack of gum behind. The disappointment and embarrassment that would be felt by most patrons is no where to be found. So used to having to make larger and larger sacrifices to feed the habit, to continue down their path; what's a pack of gum?

Making their way into the night, even though it's somewhere around 3:30, it still feels early. When your days run into weeks and months into years, days are a measurement of time that are no longer real. Walking down the empty street, filled with potholes and cracks in every direction, water left behind by a late night rain. The air hot and muggy, making their clothes heavy, sticking to their skin. She looks at him, wondering what she's doing here, how she had ended up this way, why she'd stayed so long. Thinking that this must be what people are talking about when they say it's like the train wreck that you can't look away from. She'd been with him before the devil's counterfeits had taken hold. Before the daily fix was the most important thing to him. Before she'd bought her ticket to ride on the train headed for disaster. She knows that it wasn't wrong to love him back then. She knows that there's nothing she could have done to make him see what he was eventually going to give up, give away, and sell just to make it through one more day, to one more fix.

She knows that eventually, if she wants to make it out alive, she'll have to leave. He was headed nowhere, way too fast. She'd always figured that there would be the brick wall he needed to hit before he'd anything clearly. Before their lives had turned into one sad joke after another she'd thought that they'd be together forever, settle down and have kids of their own, lives of their own.

She vaguely remembers what she had pictured their home looking like, two cars in the driveway, kids toys scattered over the lawn, bikes on the driveway. Her husband coming home from a long day at the office, loving his family, loving her. Snapped out of the day dream by the sound of the screen door to their small dingy apartment slamming closed.

They lived in a tri-plex off of one of the main side streets downtown, the streets you would take if you were trying to beat traffic on the freeway or drive on the way home from the bar, trying to avoid the cops. The furniture filling the house looked like it had been there 10 years too long, although she remembers buying it not more than a year ago. The carpet more a series of unstained patches than the alternative. The kitchen was filled with spills, dirty dishes fill the sink and have begun to stink. She doesn't remember the last time she used a clean plate or fork.