Your Rolling Stones Records

The heat returns, the humidity. Sweat runs in rivulets down throats, along hairlines, it pools in the smalls of backs and darkens cotton threads. The New York City summer nights are wild with life, people peering out from their air conditioned isolation chambers after midnight, moving tables into the streets and catching up like after a religious fast. In a corner apartment in the East Village, a small tornado runs amok.

It is too easy to tear everything apart, to scratch and claw and succumb to the overwhelming darkness; it is too familiar, too comfortable. She curled up on the couch and said it's my safest space and my most encroaching prison at once, and you remember now exactly what she means. The days, the weeks, the life, they catch up with you, they stuff your head with cotton and make you afraid of the light. Your roommate dashes in and out, in breezy summery outfits and freshly painted bronzer, trilling about her various engagements, and you don't know how long you can smile and nod in her direction before it becomes clear that your insides are performing a nuclear meltdown. You search desperately for airline tickets and are at a loss for what to do when you find them, because he said not to run away and you can't imagine the alternative.

You are determined to take the difficult track instead, to stare your demons in the eye and ask them what they want. It's just that there's a heat wave outside, and a roaring fire inside, and you're pretty sure the demons wouldn't mind just a moment's snuggle before they let you send them away.

They are such old friends, after all.