Sammy lived in my room before I did, for 3 years of her college career. She told me when I arrived that she’d burned sage there to cleanse it of bad energy, on the word of a county fair psychic. The sage she gave her was free, so why not?
That’s Sammy’s favorite phrase: why not.
It still smells like sage now, in this closet-sized single on the top floor of the building, despite Sammy’s belongings being long gone. She approves, generally, of what I’ve done with the place, now that it’s mine. She especially likes the Christmas lights.
The reason Sammy’s still here is because her childhood home is filled with the dark sticky energy of small-town disappointment, and besides, the smell of sour milk spilled in the fridge once. Not that Sammy can smell it anymore, but she knows it’s still there.
This room, ultimately, was her favorite place, the place where, she says, she evolved into the final version of herself.
We get along pretty well, me and Sammy. She claims we’re an odd couple, because I don’t talk or do much outside of school, and all Sammy ever wanted to do when she was alive was put on something with sequins and grind against strangers in clubs until the sun came up. Then she’d go back to the dorm and even there, dream about velvet skin and friction, of teeth vibrating from a heavy baseline crashing from the floor.
She understands I’m different and respects that, maybe because of the room itself that, since her entrance there and since the sage-burning, was meant to be a place of peace, of calm, of emotional cleanliness. I like that about Sammy, her sense of honor for this shrine of her life.
Of course the close quarters means we get impatient with each other; on my breaks from class I usually feel like a nap, and she disapproves. “Sleeping during the day is only fashionable if you have a hangover,” she says. “Or, if you were up at night long enough to see the moon and the stars rise in the sky and fall again. But that’s it.”
I reply, “The sun is also a star. Leave me alone.”
She mostly backs off when I refute her, but I can tell she’s concerned.
Periodically when I’m sleeping she’ll make the door knock: always two beats, knock-knock like a joke-- like there’s a corporeal someone outside the room waiting for me to play checkers with them, or some friendly shit like that. I tell her to stop it-- I’m a light sleeper so you’d better believe that kind of thing wakes me up-- but secretly, I think that it’s sweet she’s worried about me.
She goes at night, to bars or clubs or long vacated friends’ houses. I don’t like it when she’s gone. The room is stuffier, sweatier. And when she comes back, early in the AMs, it’s really jolting, because suddenly I’m cold and need to pull the felt blanket at the edge of my bed up to my chin.
Then, we’re warm together, I’d like to think, beneath the blanket and the moon and the stars sinking lower under the horizon, and the sun just beginning to melt into our window like butter in a hot pan.
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