There is a hand on my shoulder and my body is being shaken as though I’ve been caught in a tiny storm. I wake, remnants of the original euphoria still buzzing in my head. I smile when I see Digitalis’ face, despite how it’s streaked with worry. She sits me up and gives me water before she disappears into my apartment. She helps me get dressed and I stand to follow her. I pick up my car keys and she snatches them away, looking at my face for a moment before shoving her sunglasses onto me. Her hands are firm as she pulls me along with her, down the stairs and into her car.

“Asya.” Her voice sounds so clear. Everything is so clear. Her voice is wonderful. “Gael found a video of you. Do you know about it?”

“Oh, yeah.” I smile. Why was I so worried about it before?

“You won’t be so happy about it when you’re not high.” She groans, her eyes briefly cutting at me before they return to the road. I stare at them, admiring the way the sunlight fills them with color, making them a burnished bronze. “When we get there, just let me do the talking.”

“You’re such a good friend, Digitalis.” I marvel at her, “But there’s nothing to worry about. Everything is wonderful.” She purses her lips and ignores me. The edges of my happiness are fading away and I’ve become drowsy. She walks me into the studio, careful to keep my sunglasses from sliding off of my face when I become captivated by the beauty of my feet. I wondered what they called those pills on the street. They made the world so captivating.

She opens the door of the meeting room and Gael waits in there, giving his laptop a distressed expression. He looks up at us as we enter, his eyes full of concern when he sees my serene smile.

“Asya.” He says, his voice sounding as though it belonged to an angel. I sigh at the beauty of it. “Did you know about a... “ He held his own hands, “Rather distressing video of you being passed around?”

His eyes are full of such pure worry that I almost get lost in the vision of them. His eyebrows pinch together.

“Are you drunk or something?”

“Nope.” My voice sounds like I imagine a cloud might sound if it had a voice. The thought makes me laugh.

“Are you high?” His words are more strained than before. I nod enthusiastically.

Digitalis’ arms drop to her sides with frustration and Gael puts his face in his hands. He moves to sit beside me, after a moment spent collecting his thoughts.

“Asya.” He speaks gently, his hand hovering over my shoulder, as though he needed to comfort me. “There’s a video of you going around. It’s already catching attention from the media. I think we need to do something about this, okay? But I need to talk to you sober.” His eyes bore into mine, so serious that I almost want to laugh.

I’m becoming more and more tired, though. The laughter fades from my brain like a clearing fog with each second that passes. There is warmth in my eyes, draining down my cheeks in wet streaks. Gael holds me.

“We’ll fix this.” He promises, his long fingers in my hair. I couldn’t remember the last time Gael embraced me. I wanted to embrace him back, but I was getting so heavy. I collapsed into him, clinging to his clothes, and I cried. There’s a knock on the door and I can hear the manager’s stern voice, beckoning Gael away from me. I’m cold when he leaves my side, leaning onto the table to make a slow-growing puddle on the polished wood. I can hear their voices from the doorway, hushed but audible.

“The media is already releasing stories about this. None of it looks good for us...” The manager’s voice is filled with a suppressed panic.

“I know, I know.” I can imagine Gael cradling his head in his hands.

“I mean, there are a handful defending him. He was obviously assaulted… But some, Gael… He’s being called an addict again. Some of them even blame him for it because he was clearly on drugs. It’s already trending on social media and most of those sites are full of people saying that he’s dragging the band down with his destructive behavior.”

I tensed, my place in the band growing more precarious and unsure beneath my feet.

“I know how they’re reacting, Michael.” He sighs.” What do you think?” Gael asked, but he already knew what the manager was thinking.

“It’s dangerous to keep him in the band. He needs to go.” His voice was absolute, the words seeping in like a poison when they reached my ears. I was so cold, I might freeze to death in the heated meeting room.

“No.” Gael states. I hear him shuffle. “No… We need to fix this before we can even think of letting him go.”

“It’s too risky. If the fans turn on him and we don’t take action, we might lose ticket and album sales!” The manager’s whispers sound like hisses.

“It is risky, but I think it’s also risky to just cut him off. If people sympathize with him as a victim of sexual assault, it’ll kill the band for cutting him out in the aftermath. We need to think of that possibility, too. If we focus on his position as a victim of assault, we don’t have to end the band. We’ll work on fixing his addictions and getting this all sorted out. We’ll catch that… that guy,” He paused. He took a breath to cool the growing anger in his gentle voice. “We’ll catch that guy and make sure that Asya gets justice. That’s the only way I can see to fix this.”

“I don’t know… I think it’s going to be dicey…” The manager sounded cautious and afraid. Gael turned back into the room. His voice was directed towards me, now.

“It’ll be dicey for a while, but I have a plan.” Gael says, his voice rising to a normal speaking voice again. “We’re going to announce my engagement, give the press something to chew on. We hope that the video loses attention for a while until we can control how it’s reported. Asya,” His hand was on my shoulder. I looked up at him, my sunglasses sliding off of my face into the moist spot on the table where I cried. “We’ll fix this. We’ll find some way to get you through this and make sure that that fucker pays for what he did.”

Numbly, I nod. I want to go home and drink everything away. It doesn’t matter what happens after this. I don’t even care about getting justice for it, really. I’ll never feel good again. Maybe the pills can fill the void and erase the pain.

“I think you should stay with someone for a while.” Gael says, shattering my plans.

I stare at him, barely even seeing him, as I register the meaning of his words.

“I don’t want you to go on a bender over this. I want you to stay sober,” He insisted.

“Oh…” I can’t even respond. I am like a black hole, exploding into myself. The void sucks in all the happiness and joy in the world to turn it into nothingness.

“He can stay with me.” Digitalis offers, and I remember that she was here all along. Her face is serious, composed, and it almost surprised me to see her so passionless. “You and Absinthe live with your significant others, and Michael has his kids running around. I’m the only one that lives alone. Asya won’t be intruding on anything at all with me. I want to support him.”

She looks up at Gael with such a true and heartfelt concern for me he’s caught off-guard.

“Yeah. That’ll have to be the way we do this.” He looks defeated, his eyes flicking back to his laptop where I’m sure the video is waiting. Did he already watch it? Did he see it all?

I’m almost embarrassed, knowing that the entire world saw what happened to me. I almost don’t even believe that it happened. Only a few clips of the memory came back to me, fuzzy and surreal, like faded recollections of a bad dream. Maybe it was better that way.

Digitalis’ place is full of red and gold, a large painting of herself on the dining room wall. She has a rather large apartment, almost like a sky mansion. We sit down after she shows me where the guest bedroom and bathroom are. I’m too ashamed to meet her eyes.

She turns to me and her arms encircle my shoulders. She holds me like a lover, cradling the back of my head with her fingers entwined in my hair.

“I’ll help you, Asya.” She cooed. “We can make the pain go away.” She separates from me, taking pills out of the coffee table drawer. “You know how to take these, don’t you?”

She gave me a knowing look when she passed them to me, watching as I crushed one on the table and snorted it with no thought. She patted my back before she joined me.

“We’ll make you feel good again.” She promised.

I was so happy, everything seemed brighter. The obscured moon was as bright as the sun. Up and down, I spent my months in a haze of quiet euphoria. I spent my depressed days with liquor, my emotions worsening with every sip. Still, I couldn’t stop drinking and hoping it might be different next time. I spent the happy days depending on pills or cocaine for any joy when they worked. It was wonderful until it crashed, leaving me in the darkness of my sorrow. I’d stare at the bright paint of Digitalis’ apartment and the smoke from my cigarettes swirling in the air before fading away. Somehow, the brightness of my highs made my lows feel even worse. It was as if my life had become a high contrast photo, the light as white as possible beside the darkest shades of black.

In between each high and low, I filled out paperwork, attended dates with lawyers, wrote music, and had meetings in the studio. I wished that I could have been inebriated for it all.

Every second that I was sober, I was handling the business that I wanted to forget. I would describe the events of that night the man assaulted me for the lawyers, again and again. The studio had me writing songs with undertones of the event. Gael would use them to support his plan to paint me as a blameless victim. Then there were also the uncomfortable meetings of normal business where everyone tried to pretend that the video or the media weren’t on their minds. No one was normal. Even Absinthe walked on eggshells in our conversations, dancing around anything she imagined might be uncomfortable.

At first, I appreciated it. There was such an overwhelming number of new emotions rushing through me, I had been fragile for a while. Pure anguish and fear distracted the emptiness in me. The solitude seemed to be the only way to cope.

After a while, the treatment became unbearable.

I longed to connect with someone, anyone. Even if Absinthe would say something thoughtless, I missed speaking openly with her. Gael’s distance seemed like coldness. Digitalis’ selfish impulses that once upset me became something that I was desperate to deal with again. Even if she was letting me take her drugs, she didn’t seem to know how to chat with me anymore.

I couldn’t talk to the people I cared about. No one wanted to discuss what loomed over me like a shadow. Even worse tension grew in every room I entered, making me into a pariah among my closest friends.

I wanted desperately to escape the world that had fallen apart beneath my feet. Digitalis was hiding her pills from me. She told me I was relying on them too much, which probably said something considering the depth of her own addiction. I found myself on the greasy bathroom floor of a bar one day, offering my mouth to a man for a few lines.

When I stay at home, I escape to the bathroom. Every time, I check the medicine cabinet for pills. Every time, I learn all over again that Digitalis has hidden the stashes. Often, I can’t face my reflection. More than my self-loathing, the memory of my face in that video popped into my head every time I saw myself. I kept seeing it when I closed my eyes: the strange blend of watching like an observer through the video contrasted by the hazy memories of that night. New parts of the memory were always bubbling up out of the void in my mind.

Other times, I felt like my entire being had suddenly been scooped out and discarded, leaving a hungry black hole behind. I could look at my face in the mirror and it would be as if I was looking through a window at a stranger.

My eyes captivated me the most, expressing with such intensity how I lacked anything inside of me at all. At times, I feared I’d collapse and dissolve into myself, absorbed by the emptiness. I would sit on the floor and press my face against the side of the bathtub. Without drugs, the closest I could get to being high was evoking the memories of it this way. I was too numb to care about the soreness of my cheek as time passed and the hard tub pressed too long. Again, I performed my ritual, grazing my fingertips against the flaming bass I’d tattooed on my arm when my career took off.

When I was young, I used to dig my fingernails into this part of my shoulder when I was too overwhelmed to express my turmoil any other way. I’d gotten the tattoo to stop my habit, leaving something at stake if I ever fell back into it. Now, I was tempted to risk ruining the tattoo just to feel something again. My fingernails rested on my skin, and it took everything in me not to press them past the surface.

The next morning, I was putting on a suit, my hands shaking from withdrawal. I passed my kitchen, both too tempted by my liquor cabinet and too repulsed by my food to enter it. I went out that spring morning, greeting the crisp air with a quivering breath and a desperate thirst. I walked into the courtroom, looking at the man that took advantage of me, the man whose eyes I saw when I least expected it. He looked back at me, his black eyes sucking me into that night again, leaving me shivering. I sensed his eyes on me through the trial, barely able to say the words Gael told me to say. I let myself detach for it all, leaving my mind to operate itself like a robot. It was dizzying to hear the words I spoke without thinking about saying them, like my voice belonged to another person.

By the end, I’d won. With the evidence on the table, it was all too easy. I just had to convince the jury that my inebriation at the time shouldn’t put me at fault, which should have been obvious, anyway. The man would go to prison for a few years, no longer able to see me again. Gael expressed vexation that his sentence wasn’t longer as he walked me out of the courtroom. Even though it was he who spoke to me, I couldn’t focus on it. I couldn’t respond.

Somehow, I experienced almost no relief. How could I be so disconnected and care so little about something this personal to me?

To celebrate my win, Digitalis hosted a party. People filled the apartment. Many gave me impersonal and ritualistic hugs and congratulations, but most were strangers to me. I suspected that anyone working for the studio had been invited to come.

I sat alone for most of the gathering. I’d watch everyone talk and laugh with each other under the pretense of celebrating my victory in court. Few spoke to me again after their initial greetings and congratulations.

Gael’s girlfriend approached me, smiling from ear to ear. I stared at her blankly, my eyes drawn to her hands, which held something familiar and pink. My shoulders stiffened.

“I have a flower box in my apartment and I thought you’d like some flowers to cheer you up! Congratulations!” She pulled me into a polite hug before handing the peonies off to me. I smiled with gritted teeth, the smell of the blooms making me sick. “Gael is always talking about you, and I’m sure he’d like it if we all hung out more after this. I look forward to becoming your friend!”

“That means a lot to me.” I lied. “Thank you.” I gave her the practiced smile that held my career together.

I could still feel where her hands had touched me during the hug and I was ill; Her hands that held Gael, while mine could not.

She turned away and melted back into the party, no doubt seeking Gael out. I was certain that her gift wasn’t his idea. He wouldn’t have let her choose these flowers for me. I stared at the pale petals, layered over each other like concealing shields, hiding shameful secrets. I slid into the kitchen, sitting on a stool beside the counter. I laid her flowers across the counter and studied them, their scent reminding me of childhood and the sensation of manicured nails burying themselves into my shoulders. Their pinkness brought back past criticisms from a voice I hadn’t heard in almost a decade.

For every moment that I sat alone in the kitchen, I wished that I could pry open one of my cabinets for the goodies that Digitalis had hidden inside. Just a single pill or a shot of alcohol, and I might calm my nerves enough to face the people around me. I couldn’t do it, though, knowing that any of the eyes in the room might see me, and I’d have a whole new set of problems to worry about.

I closed my eyes, hoping that the minutes would fly past me. I only opened them when I saw those black eyes reaching into me like hooks, threatening to rip me apart. I closed my fist and pretended that I saw nothing as I opened my eyes, unable to shake the sensation of being touched by unwanted hands. The peonies on the counter filled my nose with their sickly sweet smell. Masochistically, I forced myself to touch their petals and fixate on the shame they reminded me to feel. The longer the gathering lasted, the deeper I drifted into myself. I recalled how I’d been empty for years when I wasn’t drunk. I pondered the sorrow I’d known without pills in the past few months. I wondered about the haunted nights that I spent awake in my bed, trying to pretend that I wasn’t afraid of waking up with hands on my body again.

What if I just died?

People passed before my eyes, walking about as though I didn’t even exist. Gael was with his girlfriend in the living room, laughing with someone that I didn’t know. Digitalis was behind me somewhere, joking loudly without paying me any mind. Absinthe was having a quiet conversation by a window with a couple of people I’d never met. No one in the room so much as looked at me, even though it was my victory and my grief that brought them together. I didn’t matter at all to any of them.

I looked at a blank spot on the wall, searching inside of myself for anything amid the void. I knew that I’d been unhappy for almost my entire life. The things I’d wanted when I was younger I’d grown to learn would never satisfy me or that I could never have. If I knew that I would never be happy, why should I want to live through more of it?

The party was getting slower and people were leaving. I went to the bathroom with my flowers, knowing that none of them would notice my absence. I wanted to cry, to let some of my grief leave me as it so easily did when I was younger. Nothing came.

I grabbed my cigarette lighter from my pocket and held it beneath a peony, the petals drying and curling into black ash, impossibly slow because of their freshness. The flame seared the skin of my thumb as I held the lighter. I was too numb and focused on destroying the cruel flower to care.

The noise outside faded away, so I set the peonies aside and rifled through Digitalis’ medicine cabinet. She had replaced some of her stash, and I spread some of her cocaine out onto the countertop. As it made its way into my head a wave of euphoria washed over me. For just a minute, resting against the nice coldness of the porcelain toilet bowl, I enjoyed the falsest kind of happiness.