Kase sat on the porch of his little yellow house. It was the middle of the afternoon and somehow sunny on a gray month, a grey year.

He was blowing bubbles like it was spring.

Kase had done two dirty lines off his kitchen table, careful not to scratch his nose on the broken splinters. His mother wasn’t home and he found the bottle of bubblewater under his bathroom sink when he was searching for something else.

He never found that something else.

Each bubble was thin, frail like him and almost as see-through, iridescent around the edges. The same way coke made his pale skin paler, made it glow. They floated as high as they could before popping in the sun of the silent neighborhood.

He waited for each one to burst before he blew another one.

Kase kept at it for more than an hour, his wand never scraping the bottom of the bottle. He stared blankly into the street, into the sky, watching and saying nothing to the few people who passed by. His mind never stopped clicking though.

He was thinking about a million things at once.

There was a time he went to school, for real went to school, with a backpack and his homework complete. Before his kitchen table was splintered up and coke residue had sunk in. His backpack was full of loose notebook pages in his messy handwriting.

He was best at math, worst at english.

There was a time when his mother smoothed his hair from his face and kissed his freckled cheeks, patting him on the rear to go out and play. When she was well and the cabinet wasn’t full of bottles he could swipe to sell on the corner by the school. Before she spilt his lips with her fist.

He thought about it and it all seemed fuzzy.

It felt like he had been living the same life over and over again, the same days on static repeat. Cocaine and video games and the cheapest shit from the fast food menu. Laughter, with a sick wide grin, at people who were doing better than him.

He would hate to admit how hollow it felt.

Kase left a girlfriend once because she wanted to stop having sex, because suddenly it didn’t seem like such a good idea. They only dated a few weeks but it was already too much. She wanted to be something. She wanted control over herself. She kissed his metal fingertips and laughed, but with a nasty sneer he left her topless in her bedroom and stole her bra. He sold it to a freshman for enough to buy a few hits of coke.

He had forgotten about the whole thing.

There, though, between the sun of the afternoon and the popping bubbles, it surged up as he started to crash down and that feeling of hopelessness washed on through. After he blew his last bubble he picked up the wand and flung it into the street. Then he inverted the bottle and spilled the rest of the bubble water onto the porch stairs.

He took a deep breath, staring at it.

The comedown brought a headache and a feeling of anxiety in his chest. There was no more coke left to do and all Kase was left with was shivering hands and a slippery mess, layed out all over his street. Kase was left with so many things he could not fix.

He stood up fast, looking first to the sun before his legs instinctively began to stretch out.

Kase knew all of a sudden, the only way to break cycles and kill addictions were to replace them with another. One addiction for another, for another and with a desperate desire, he jumped over the spilled bubble water and dashed down the street.

There was a warm body out there,
breath like drugs,
waiting,
waiting,
waiting for him.

One addiction for another, and he left white for then unknown.

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