flash nonfic by rachael greene

The Come Down

The dream is recurring. I choose it night after night. In it, I am inexplicably released from the rules of gravity and can propel myself as far off the ground as I wish with a gentle bounce. Like I’ve figured out the trick to moonwalking or turned into one of those cartoons in a live action movie—the rules no longer apply to me. I bounce higher and higher until I go too far, an accidental double bounce, and suddenly I’m breaking through the ozone layer, watching everything I love grow small and distant. 

In the morning I can smell the rancid odor lingering on my scalp and stuck under my fingernails. I contort my neck into the bedding to find relief from the headache like a child running from a medicine spoon. The fever of my tinnitus is so immediate it’s as if there’s an old TV set wedged between my ears. The night comes back in a yellow haze. I’m hungry, thirsty, I have to shit, and my bladder is surprisingly full after only a few hours of sleep. 

I creep downstairs, feet light on someone else’s floor. I practically float with the stimulants lingering in my system and my hands clutch at the concave space under my ribs like they're searching for a rip cord. I steal the butt of a loaf left open on the counter and stuff it down to steady the shake that’s starting. The tap water I chug contemplates return—like everything I put into my body lately, it’s too much too fast. 

The cold sweat on my forearms bites in the air conditioning as I make my way back upstairs and crawl under covers that reek of the bodies they’ve touched. I huddle into myself, feeling for anything that pushes back, but am met by an alarming give. It feels as if the marrow has been sucked from my bones, leaving even the teeth hollow in my skull. 

Are you doing a lot of blow? My older brother had asked. I’d gone to see him once after a big night, car whistling up an empty interstate in the late spring sunshine.

My face was so limp on the drive up to see him that I worried I wouldn’t be able to fake it when I arrived, which led to overdoing it. Too bubbly, too exuberant, too flighty. He didn’t have much experience outside our small mountain town, but he knew—a single twenty-something living in downtown Atlanta, gradually getting thinner, more angular. His worst assumptions were all true. 

Eat a good meal, he said when I avoided his gaze. A home cooked one, if you can. Meat, vegetables, mashed potatoes, you know. Ride it out. It’s just the come down. 

Somehow, balled up in a stranger’s bed now, I’m glad my brother knows about the lifestyle I’ve been trying so hard to conceal. I’m glad I am predictable because I think it means I am also remediable. This is the feeling I carry with me like the warmth of a heat lamp when I finally gather my shoes and crawl home. 

Lying in the fetal position on my couch watching shadows turn on the floor, I crave invisibility, buoyancy, the familiar disappearance. But it’s the memory of what it’s like to be a full person—a being that catches light long enough to cast a shadow—that keeps me from drifting further off the ground. A nostalgia for heaviness leads me to order pickup from the soul food restaurant by Ponce City Market instead of checking to see who will be out tonight. 

I’ll go out again, chase the same recurring dream, lay weightless on that couch many more times, but I’ll always return to earth. Long enough to call home—touch base with dependable gravity. Feel the edges of my stomach stretch, gratefully conspicuous to myself. 

And this is what becomes addictive. This is the thing I want to feel over and over. 

The pounding in my head recedes. I watch TV with the curtains open. It’s late afternoon and sunlight washes over the couch, warming my bare thighs pressed flat into the cushions. I inhale the scent of my unwashed hair and the empty takeout containers, think to myself I ought to do something about it, but I’ve become immobile. Nothing can lift me. My stomach rises and falls with each breath and my eyelids grow heavy against the sun.

Rachael Greene is a nonfiction Appalachian writer. She received an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte. Her work can be found in the Southern Review of Books, The Masters Review, and Another Chicago Magazine. She is currently working on a book about her childhood in rural North Georgia. Find her on Instagram @greenepen.