Shadows of Ourselves (2016 Original Edition)

THIRTY-ONE: What Hell Looks Like

What did hell look like? If I was being honest it was probably this old pool hall in the West Side where me and Riley used to go to score pot in the ninth grade.

Total dive.

There was this long alley behind the tin building that housed the pool hall and bar. Narrow, full of dead grass and boulders, bordered on the other side by a faded red fence taller than us, enclosing a yellowed lawn, and a long duplex with white rubber siding and black finishing. The buildings blocked out the sun, so it was always shadowy there. Weeds sprouted all along the alley, blowing in the wind.

We'd always met our dealer at the mouth of it and then ventured deeper when the girl left, sitting against the base of the wall and smoking from an old pipe Riley didn't have anymore, this tiny blue thing she called Hypatia, after some crater on the moon.

Sometimes as we smoked someone would shove open the heavy back door of the pool hall and leave it propped open with a cinder block. If they saw us, they said fuck all, and nobody ever called the cops.

I guess in most ways I miss that alley—even though it was open on both ends it felt like its own little world on the inside, like nobody could reach us there. It offered a safe space where we could hide from the outside for a while, listening to bad music and the sound of pool balls clacking together emanating from inside. But I still hated it. It was where we'd gone to get high and spill the things we couldn't elsewhere. We'd sit there and talk until we were both crying, and we didn't comfort each other, because we weren't that kind of people, but we were there, just there, sitting inches apart, and the being there—the act of existing near each other—that was enough comforting for the both of us.

We'd looked away from each other, staring at that ugly, flaking, stupid fence, and told one another the bullshit that we pretended not to care about or couldn't normally talk about, because it split us open like eggs, and just passed that pipe back and forth.

We stopped going there sometime around the beginning of eleventh grade when the dealer had moved to Vancouver and I'd found a new one and Riley had quit smoking altogether. I didn't remember exactly the last time I'd been there, when it had been or what it was like.

I guess life is like that; you never knew your last words would be your last words until after the fact, never truly could tell the last time you'd see a place until that time had already passed. But the murkiness of it annoyed me, knowledge and memories eluding my grasp, maybe impossible to reclaim. Lack of closure.

And that was what hell seemed like: not burning, not being tortured, or rotting alive, or absolute isolation.

Just not knowing or not remembering—not being able to go back and change anything. Looking back on things you'd done wrong or left unfinished that you couldn't reconcile with. If that was truly hell then I was already living it, every day, with a pile of regrets ever-expanding behind me.

But for some reason I equated suffering with the mental image of the fucking alley behind the ugly pool hall, and I think a part of me, forever sixteen and confused and angry, always would.

The point is, for as long as I could remember, that's what suffering had looked like.

And now? Now it looked like this: not being close to Hunter. Not being able to reach out and touch him, or have him standing next to me throwing insults at me while he held my hand. Not being able to do magik with him, feeling our powers flare together through the bond in a way that stole my breath, left me intoxicated on the rush of it.

Why? I have no clue. Because of magik, maybe. Because I'm a fucking idiot, probably. Both. The bond was so close to settling now, it was like we were partly the same person.

Didn't change anything.

There was only one option for me now. He would never forgive me for this. And I didn't want to live like that, without him, without magik. But I could. I could if I had to. I could if it meant saving Riley. I looked my only choice in the eyes, and I made it, without a second thought.