So there she stood. The air was still, and slowly the reality around her started progressing back into her consciousness. She dropped her half-smoked cigarette onto the sidewalk and smudged it out with the toe of her boot, “Yeah, yeah, I know, she was definitely out of line. She needs to get a grip.” The group of 20-something guys across the street were staring, and she caught herself staring back. “She’s just high. It’s fine, I’m fine, I think I’m going to head home.” The people she called her closest group of friends, preoccupied with the music coming from the doors only steps away, nodded at her answer, or so she wanted to remember, and Abby stepped off the curb and toward the group.
San Francisco at night in February is always peculiarly warm. The neighborhoods vary in weather due to how high up on a hill they are, or their proximity to the bay, but downtown was stale and warm this night. The chill of the bay breeze bounced back off the buildings following the shore line, filtering nothingness through the blocks of concrete and plexi-glass leading up to the corners of Market and 6th Street. The families lay still in slumber through out these buildings, the offices empty, and the back rooms of restaurants bustling with servers clocking out and winding the locks on their lockers. Still, at 1AM, Abby steadied her stupored walk toward the group of leering boys.
After the confrontation was done she already knew what was going to happen. The bus would take too long to get there, he wouldn’t answer the phone, and the only calming thing about being alone at 2 in the morning with a bruised arm holding her keys as if she could possibly fend off an attacker with them was the lull of the city lights swirling as the bus climbed up the hill to her house. “You’ve got Danny, leave a message” was the soundtrack to the past 6 months of her life. Two years before that she had driven away from his house with her bags packed, assured that what was beyond that bridge would fix it all. Now he wouldn’t even take her calls, even after the voice mail explaining a drug dealer had just threatened her in the middle of the street until she had ran 5 blocks to the bus stop. It’s always something though, right?
The angry grip only of a man who had money on his mind at 1AM didn’t want or need a drunk 19 year old girl from the suburbs telling him who he could or couldn’t sell to. The spin between sobriety and reality weren’t locked in as Abby’s face was wet with tears, “She doesn’t know when to stop, just don’t answer her calls!” The bathroom in the bar 20 feet away could have had an imprint of the back fo her body with how hard Stephanie had thrown her into it. All Abby could see was past her face and the clogged vessels full of white powder from her nostrils, to her brain, back down her throat.
At 2:15 Abby had pinned her long red hair up, and set a glass of water on the floor next to her bed. She pulled a tshirt on, but left her tights on, and pulled the covers up. Her roommate lay snoring feet away from her. The screen on her cell phone only flashed the time, no call backs, no apologies. She set her alarm for 9AM. Things weren’t supposed to turn out this way.
It’s been proven that people will zone out and not pay attention to where they’re driving for entire minutes at a time, but your body will subconsciously make the appropriate decisions of when to turn the steering wheel. Sometimes you will snap out of whatever place your mind has been, and not recognize the street you have driven down dozens, hundreds, thousands of times before.
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happy
