Three Months Later
Cody stared out the window of the tour bus, tears on the verge of falling from his eyes. Nothing shutting them tight couldn’t get rid of. However, there was no quick fix for the other symptoms. His hands shook and his breath became a gasping wheezing sound as it tried to escape his throat. He tried to take in breath slowly with his head down. After a few minutes, he composed himself, wiped his eyes, and went back to staring out the window. Outside white trees wrapped in white mist flew by, like ghosts rising from the ground and being passed by, forgotten by the living. His earlier self-medication did no good, the hyperventilation came back in force. He kept on reminding himself of what his favorite dead philosopher wrote: “If it’s out of your control, let it go.” Or something to that effect. Philosophy to him was mainly a vehicle for getting laid in college. What it actually gave him was a nicotine addiction coupled with an over-inflated vocabulary. For some reason neither got him laid very much.
No matter how hard he tried, the dead man’s words couldn’t shut out his thoughts of the dead. Of that bathroom floor, covered in pills, blood spreading out into the hallway. He could see it now, somewhere out there in the fog. A door in a cloud opened up and revealed a red ocean. He walked through that door and saw Rachel lying there, still breathing. And did nothing.
“Earth to Cody, you alive?”
Cody shook his head as if someone had just poured ice water over it.
“Sorry, what were you saying?” Cody replied, regaining his senses, the tremor in his hands dissipating, his breath coming under control.
“Dude you can’t be spacing out all the time. I was saying, are you ready to go?” said the man with a playful smile. That smile never left his face, at least as far back as Cody could remember, it was a permanent fixture on the face of Rick Davis. That smile was etched into a face of straight lines and a sharp jaw. His hair, the color of the sun, was a wave of light. His eyes were the deep blue sky. He was so handsome Cody sometimes felt like hitting him. He could do with a little imperfection.