"From Ignorance to Negligence"

“I could live like this,” Isabella says, back pressed against her firm, white mattress.

The bottle of vodka that we’ve nearly emptied is sitting on the dresser and if I look at it enough, it blurs into two. I’m not quite sure how we got here. I know we were at the party and then we left, then returned again to sneak out the bottle of liquor and then, in some twist of events that got lost between the passing of time, we ended up in Isabella’s room, in her bed, with Mia already asleep at the foot, her pink-streaked hair strewn everywhere.

It’s a nice bed, I realize. I’ve never quite thought about it before but now, when my senses seem to be functioning at double the rate they normally do, I can feel my body fitting into the small curve I’ve created where I lay.

“Live like what?” I ask suddenly. I’d forgotten that Isabella had said anything at all.

What had I been thinking about? The bed? The party? Isabella?

Isabella.

Isabella looks calm. Face flushed, eyes just as bright but missing the worried glint they normally carried. Isabella carries her worry on her back, she drags it around wherever she goes, she's always anticipating and waiting, and waiting, and waiting for something to go wrong. 

But not now. 

The air around her is lighter, I can feel the difference, can feel the way Isabella’s shoulders have dropped with relief. 

“Like this.” Isabella repeats, making a vague hand motion that doesn’t quite do anything for me except make me dizzy.

“You’re not making it better.” I reply honestly, nudging her shoulder. “Just give me a word for it.”

Isabella huffs, staring intently at the ceiling as if she’ll find the perfect descriptor for her emotions if she looks up a little harder, like she’ll find it inscribed somewhere in the popcorn ceiling.

“Quiet.” She says finally, eyes lighting up now that she’s found the word. “Everything is always so loud, and now everything is quiet.”

I can’t be sure what it is that Isabella means. Sure, the vodka may have slowed my brain down, maybe it even relaxed me, but I am not sure my brain feels quieter. If anything, the things I feel seem to be exemplified, every color more vibrant, every emotion more grand. If anything, I feel as if someone has turned up the volume of my life and left me with no ear plugs.

I know I’m asking too many questions. I know Isabella might get scared, might close herself off at the thought of giving too much away. I know that as soon as Isabella starts talking, really talking, she pulls back just as fast. Like a flash of honesty in her facade, a sudden clearing in her smoke and mirrors.

“It’s all so much,” Isabella admits. She says it like it’s a bitter realization, something she’s forced herself to accept. She's lost somewhere in her own mind, her eyes are glossed over. “Ever since I was a kid, it’s all just been so much.”

“What is?”

Isabella pauses, closing her eyes, and folding her hands under her head, “My head,”

“Your head?” I feel useless, repeating words from Isabella’s sentences for clarity. But I’m buzzed, and my head isn’t quiet, it’s foggy and half-working, and I just want to help. I can’t seem to understand her.

“My head,” Isabella agrees, eagerly, “and the things around me, people talking and pens clicking and a conversation I overheard days ago that I still think about. And I’m in over my head in experiences and sounds and moments and I can feel everyone crawling under my skin, clogging up my lungs,”

I can’t do anything but nod. I don’t want to speak and pop the thin bubble of comfortability that Isabella has placed us in. 

“But this, the alcohol,” Isabella continues, “it makes it all quiet. It makes it all manageable.”

I am nodding and nodding as Isabella keeps going. Let me fix this for you, I think. My alcohol-muddled brain can’t even be sure what the problem is but it’s the only thought in my head that’s slow enough to stick. Let me fix this for you.

There’s a hum somewhere in the room, it screams as neither of us speak. I have nothing to say and Isabella looks like she’s forming an idea so we wait, and we wait. 

And we wait some more.

“When I’m drunk,” Isabella starts again, and then she shakes her head, "when I'm high, God, I feel like I can finally breathe.” 

“You can’t breathe normally?”

“No, maybe I can.” Isabella thinks out loud. “But it’s hardly even breathing if I’m always forcing the air in, right?”

“I guess.”

“I’m so alive like this,” Isabella smiles, “I feel so close to dying and I feel so alive. If I close my eyes, I feel like I’m blind, I forget everything.” She pauses. “I love it.”

Even drunk, I’m starkly aware that she’s scaring me, that what she’s saying is fundamentally wrong or disordered in some way. It’s all very Augustinian—an act aimed at a good that falls short because of some disordered desire. “Isabella—” 

“I forget about all the terrible things, too, you know.” Isabella cuts me off, the words are fervent and quick, like they’re racing to get out, toppling one over the next like an escape. “I forget about them.”

Isabella presses off the mattress to help Mia, her face void of emotion, her shoulder’s heavier once more. Her steps are still uneven but the solace she’d described no longer seems to be present.

Isabella returns to her pretending and now, I realize then, I have to pretend as though I can look at her without knowing that there are parts of her ordered wrongly; parts that could so easily ruin her life. 

I had been pushed, by Isabella herself, out of ignorance and into negligence, now acting compliant in the face of Isabella’s self destruction. 

What kind of friend—no, what kind of person—did that make me?

The image of Isabella’s vodka-heavy smile sticks in my head, lighter than any smile I’d ever seen from her before. It’s a burden. 

For a moment, I can almost understand Isabella’s desire for quiet. Almost.