and life flows on within you and without you Who: Marijuana & Heroin When: Monday, 12 October Where: Central Park, Lennon Memorial What: A break from wedding planning, a romantic walk, and things that need to be said. Marijuana talks aspects with Heroin. Warnings: tba
Once, fall was Heroin’s favourite time of year; the dying of the leaves, the first bite of cold air before the winter came had been a promise, once. Before it became cluttered with reminders, not all of them his own, and the last season of refuge turned colder than it should. The promise nothing more than the coming winter. A ghost smile peaked at the corners of his mouth, hidden from his brother-lover-fiancé, by the veil of hair that was down, down, swept over Heroin’s face, as usual. He turned the collar of his coat up, even over the scarf Marijuana had knitted him as the wind drove leaves across their path. Even against the grass, Heroin could almost hear a rattle (bone rattle, dice rattle, child’s toy, didn’t really matter) while the crunch was muted on the soft earth. It was a year for broken promises, most of them Heroin’s own. It was an ill-fitting reversal and he was still off-balance, the need to reel and rage at odds with happy and wedding and love. The wind shifted and he stuffed his hands into his coat pockets.
The park felt quiet, whether it was or not Heroin couldn’t guess. He walked beside Marijuana and the world didn’t extended any farther, everything that mattered brushed Heroin’s arm, his side, his hip and elbow by turns as they cut across the grass to the memorial. The concrete only a few feet away but a whole world distant, Marijuana’s world and Heroin fell back a step, no more accidental brushes of side-by-side, but a touch there and then to his lover’s back before Heroin faded to the nonexistent crunch of leaves.
Fall felt like winter, quiet. There was the almost-whisper, a hum that Heroin had grown used to hating, loving, never exactly hearing. Sometimes it was better with Marijuana, sometimes his presence faded the whisper away and other times Heroin could hear clearer through their contact. Mostly, though, he ignored it. That was, after all, his favourite tactic, ignore and pretend to forget and hope (against hope, for whatever that meant) that the world would bend and whatever he was ignoring and forgetting and fleeing would disappear.
He was also the addict, as well as the dream.
The leaves crunched loudly on the pavement; Heroin wondered if he’d missed anything in the quiet. Ahead, the memorial was etched in flowers—almost irony. Except that it wasn’t, and he was pulled back into the moment and the wedding and the joy and fuck the stress and the lingering worries that never quite disappeared because legalization was looming and that was change and Heroin didn’t change—except that he did and he had and he’d fucking left Cocaine for fuck’s sake—and the was always more that neither of them—Heroin or Marijuana, and Marijuana—never really said. It didn’t matter. The things they weren’t saying, might never say—hoped never to say, if Heroin were being honest, and hoped never to hear—were filling up the silence faster than the sound could flee it.
Once, fall was Heroin’s favourite time of year, but now the promise was quiet and he heard it echo in locking up the studio, in staring at the endless to-do lists, in tending the rooftop garden that would have to be put away in the winter. And then, of course, there was always something else. And now it was a memorial, Heroin slid his hands from his pockets and ran fingers through his hair, smoothed it into some kind of order before the next breeze. Of course, the flowers on the memorial were perfect and undisturbed. He snorted. Then remembered exactly who was at his side and let his hair tumble back around his face.
Stress, it was stress from planning the wedding, it had to be. And the impending bachelor parties which Heroin really wished he could sleep through and softening toward legalization and—he wasn’t sure what else, but there was something else; there was always something else.