My trip home was far less excruciating then I had originally thought it would be. Nights before I left I remained sleepless, finding my thoughts traveling down a path that was annually trodden, trailing my footsteps down some unfortunate nightmare's yellow brick road off to never, never land. I so infrequently attended emotional conferences hosted in these nightmares, meaning that returning to my home always felt foreign, if only on the one occasion I would surely go to Africa every year, planned and paid for. There were years impregnating the distance between how I originally thought I would meet that baby, and now... What was it, almost eleven years ago? The baby would have been eleven years old. The last decade of my life would have been written in an intensely different fashion. And during the trip, I expected all of these harbored fears, worries, and feelings to mutate and assault me upon landing on the tarmac of the airport closest to the home I grew up in and a. childhood that felt nearly light years in the past. When the heat overtook all of my senses on arrival, a heatwave of traumatic memories surfaced as if being cooked by a proverbial blast from the past and it forced me to pay attention to the smoke-like smell as if the acrid stink was supposed to be alluring.

I knew the scent of tragedy all too well. Acrid, grotes que, sulfuric, and rotten, the very smell that attracted your attention was merely masking a sad fate, just waiting to be handed out; he was the very scent of tragedy, a smell I knew too well. It was different, somehow... Somehow there was something that had changed in such a brief period of time that I hadn't even a moment to notice it. I left some kind of weight on the South Africa plane that had safely given me passage from my past to the present. Oh, something was definitely different when I returned home, feeling lighter without the anonymous weight I had carried for the last eleven years. In attempting to find the root of this, I had spent many hours pouring over my own thoughts as if they were bits of data to be assembled to make some kind of sense about why I didn't feel the same intense panic with fever-like shivers wracking my skin in goosebumps. But no, there was no instructions in the assembly of my newfound peace. Somehow, I had been able to put the smell of tragedy, the panic... the fear. I'd been able to put it into a kind of mental pandoras box to keep the memories safe from disappearance, but also to keep me safe from drowning in their waves.

It was until I was forced to see parts of those nightmares return to life when I had been consumed in the darkness of Serafina's basement did that peace, calamity, serenity.... Yeah, it was until that moment where I realized just what it was I ignored during my yearly trips to Africa, when I realized that there were other memories that might have that same tragic smell, smoke, but had been hidden by the largest wreck of memories in Serena and the baby. Once the dust and haze settled from the smoke, other memories began to come to the surface. The moment the specters had taken on visible form in Sera's basement collided with an unfortunately timed need to connect memories in illusions with the bodies I was able to see in those moments. I had always thought of myself as a strong man, but then in those defining moments I think the correct description is the phrase, 'then he fell to his knees... In those moments, my knees didn't exist. I fell flat onto my face, pressing any of my remaining dignity out from every exit I had. Betrayed by my own body, I would lay a heap, victim to horrific imagery of my past. The spectral dust of the countless lives I had ruined had disturbed me, yes, but it was more in the moments that I caught sight of her perfect, golden hair or her ... In those moments when I realized I could truly see the soul of the woman I'd loved... I reached for the hands of a mistress I had taken long before my golden Serena had been taken from me.

This mistress had been calling my name for some time. I heard her seductive voice, urging me to find my way to save her as she always did. And when I did move to save her, it was always as if I touched a lightswitch and away went the smell of smoke, instead offering me the salty smell of sunshine and horizon I had always attributed to those beautiful green eyes and blonde hair. Away the dark shades went, allowing me to see myself, the world, and my memories only in shades of unidentifiable gray. With the lack of color, my memories were easier to pass over than a child finding a movie in black and white instead of vibrant colors. My mistress always offered me a calm below the white-cap waves of her ocean, a serenity afforded only on borrowed time (read: drugs). She allowed me to save her by injecting her into my veins and allowing her reign of all of my memory. After leaving Serafina's home, I ... I just couldn't keep seeing so many colors. I often had heroin near me, testing my ability to stay away from it at almost all times. But now? This time? There was nothing to stop me from plugging the tip of the spearhead delivering my immediate fate into my blood stream. The needle found it's way into a vein in my arm, and the amber liquid, Heroin, was once again running my show.

The first time, it had been fine. I should have let the high wear off, let the drugs wear out of my system... But his eyes had just looked like mine. I had never seen them open when he was alive, and the effervescent blue was too familiar. Before I had seen so much evidence that that life? It had existed, in another life. The physical evidence was enough that it set of dynamite in my brain, lighting a fuse that hadn't been lit in a long time. I buckled under the heat, under the sizzle of rope. There my mistress was, hoisting me back up, cooling me down. Heroin always was the answer, why ha-...

Had I stopped?

It began occurring to me that the first time I had started taking the drug again had only been the morning before but in my delirium I had misplaced those memories while I instead got lost in an amber haze in the atrocities of my past. That haze was dark and thick, meaning I had spent my time awake instead of in a drug induced stupor. Too soon after this realization did my eyelids start to droop a little too heavily. I knew what the slump felt like, I knew what it looked like. I was too professional at the 'using' game that I wasn't familiar with the stages of an overdose. I had been there before, too often, so my ability to partake in magic to rid myself of the chemicals I formed the substance with was honed. I felt walls closing in, and I began gently pressing them back with the magical properties I had in order to get the chemicals out... I should feel better...

I couldn't have explained how I knew where the young vampire lived, but if she had spoken of the address once I would be surprised. I could feel the drug's resistance to leave my body, propping my shoulder on the wall opposite her apartment after announcing my presence with a rather sloppy knock. When she opened the door, it would be obvious to Isolt that there was something wrong with me. I'd casually propped myself up on the wall to keep from toppling into a heap, but when she beckoned for my attention by asking me what happened, my weight shifted involuntarily and I was sent staggering to keep my balance. It brought me closer to the door, which I merely stepped inside of before yet answering Isolt's question. Fortunately, I had enough brainpower to wiggle my sweater off to pull up the plain white t-shirt beneath it to show Isolt the gangrenous looking infection seeping from the trackmark I'd been using for however long my binge had been. I shook my head less than gracefully, unable to move from her foyer area to position myself anywhere else, intendingfor her to understand that I meant I had tried to do all that I could and couldn't get it all out... But, with all due respect, Isolt wasn't a mind reader and I didn't actually say I'd done anything to try to rid myself of the drug.

"Mm'I g'nna die?"

My words were uttered under my breath, manipulated by the strong accent that pain and the drug itself often brought out. This was the first time I hadn't been able to fix my own mistake... My mistress had never led me astray so far. My teeth were grit, obviously intending for Isolt to hurry up and give me information I completely hadn't given her time to give me yet.