The Emotion Junky - Pt. 01

Rian sits in his musty apartment on a stool in the center room of his apartment.

He still wears the same black suit and white shirt from a week ago for the funeral.

His tie is still done and tight with the top button still done.

He sobs while holding another emotion chip, a fragment, in his hand.

The glass tab with the digital insert ends glows neon pink.

Just like his veins and his eyes.

When he cries, there's an electronic reverb that garbles his sobs.

He says his dead wife's name, but he can't even recognize it anymore.

Rian holds out as long as he can, letting the pain of loss build in him.

His neon pink lights up the dark and messy room scattered with unwashed clothes.

*I miss her*, he thinks.

He inserts the chip into the neural net at the insert just behind his right ear.

The fragment uploads and gives its little chime for connection.

For a moment the pain is overwhelming and his neon withdrawal pulses.

But it slowly recedes.

As the memory of another woman.

Another love.

Mixes with his own dead wife.

And his trip down a broken road called memory begins.

---

#

The first time he met Carole, she wore a maroon dress with a gold body chain. Rian walks around the corner of the dueling bars with a Dresden theme of olive walls and rounded wood. It smells like a friday. Then he smells her as he passes.

She has the scent of gardenias and sunscreen and it makes him stop. It's the middle of winter but it makes him feel like it's the start of summer vacation. He turns to his right to look at Carole, martini glass in her hand and laughing at what one of her friends said.

His staring presence becomes noticed by everyone in her group, and she is the last to notice.

She looks different this time. Her hair used to be long and natural brunette with highlights in it. Natural ones. His memory used to tell him that her gold hoop earrings sparkled in the light of the bar. But this time, her hair is short, neon blue, with artificial highlights in it.

The dress is no longer a soft maroon, but tight latex.

He shakes his head, feeling awkward.

"Um, hi," Carole says to Rian.

Remembering his manners and the manner in which he met her, he steps through the group of her friends without regarding them.

They change all the time anyways and he can never remember their faces.

"Hi. I'm Rian. What are you drinking?" Rian asks.

Carol tips the martini glass and rattles the uneaten olives.

"Dry gin martini," she says smiling.

Rian swore when she told him that the first time she swirled her hair in her finger, but he doesn't remember Carole being that obvious.

This version of her seems to be much more forward as she adjusts her blue bob of hair and fluffs it.

"Want to join me for a drink at the bar?" Rian asks, pointing to an open corner with soft lighting.

Carole just smiles at him and puts out her empty glass. Rian takes it and then her other hand as he leads her to the bar.

---

#

Rian hates small talk even though he relishes any moment that he can with Carole down this broken lane of his mind. But this time, he skips to the part where her favorite song, Chrysanthemums Crash, comes on. The beat makes her move and swing her hips. Rian feels himself starting to become turned on with her movement as she presses the glass to her blue lips. She gives him a side eye as her body rocks to the heavy beat of the music.

"You want to dance?" she asks him.

*Always*, he thinks.

She reads his mind this time and takes him by the hand.

The dance floor is crowded but the touch of strangers is empty.

She leads him to the middle where the air is the thickest and the light flashes are the brightest. She puts her soft hands around his shoulders as she faces him, keeping a blue eye contact that changes color in the light.

He feels their hips connect and move together with the music, their legs finding their grove in one another.

It's the feel of her that Rian remembers the most. That he misses the most. That he can never get enough of.

He pulls her close by wrapping his hand around the small of her back and practically pulls her up into him. Her hair smells like chemicals for a moment and the image of her shifts. It snaps into her original form.

Hair brunette and straight with highlights.

She smells like that combination of sunscreen and summer vacation.

He feels his heart fluttering to life, feeling the life of her in his hands and on his chest and his hips.

But then it snaps back with the music.

Blue neon hair.

Chemicals from the dye.

Her movement on him during the dance starts to bump against his natural rhythm.

The strangeness of his lust takes over.

And he digs his hands into her hips.

She moans with delight in his ear.

And the broken lanes of his mind start to diverge from his memory and the high from the love fragment he has plugged into his brain.

---

#

The road grows steep in his mind very quickly.

It's an unfamiliar motel on a road that he knows a few blocks away from where he lives.

He's visited before.

Carole in her mix of neon blue and latex pulls him by the hand down the scuffed hallway.

He's never wanted her to be naked and on top of her more in that moment.

The feeling of their first time rests in his mind.

The way she used to grind her hips on him as she fucked him on top.

How she used to cup her breasts and run her hands through her hair as she did.

Sometimes she'd take his hand and suck on his finger, just so he could watch her.

She enjoyed being watched.

And he reaches out to grab her by the sides of her face to look deep into her eyes.

But Carole in the hallway continues to tug at him down the motel to a room at the end of the hall.

Inside are dirty white sheets of uncomfortable scratchy material.

This version doesn't bother laying down.

His hands explore her body immediately, finding familiar groves of her hips and turns of her breasts as he slides off the latex and it flops to the floor.

His fingers find her femininity, already smooth and wet, waiting for him.

Carole's legs are unmistakable as she raises one to rest over the crook of his arm.

She leans back against the wall, the flickering halogen light from the bathroom his only light outlining her face.

His pants drop to the floor.

His masculinity rises.

And he presses into her.

But her moan isn't the sound of Carole.

It's someone else.

He reaches for her face, searching for the familiarity of her hips.

The curve of her supple breasts.

The feeling of her tongue on his finger.

The look in her eyes.

But she's not there.

It's someone else.

The lane of memory is broken.

And his high ends.

---

#

Rian comes back to reality in his dank apartment.

Neon teal and purple with flashes of pink flicker in the small window of his studio.

There's a new pool of tears at his feet.

Some are on his dress shoes.

He puts his head into his hands and feels the wetness of his tears.

He doesn't know who to blame.

How could he not touch his wife during a pandemic?

How can anyone be so physically distant during such a time?

No one could.

Not him.

Not Carole.

Not the couple that they swap with on Fridays.

Or the bulls that they'd play with on Saturdays.

Or their unicorns that joined them on Sundays.

Or the various other married, engaged, or non-married couples they'd see.

Did he pass it to his wife?

Or did they?

His mind goes in circles wondering if he killed her.

But he tries to remind himself that the pandemic killed her.

In a time where religious fervor prevented the very available science to save them all.

I miss her, he thinks again.

He takes the memory fragment out of his head.

There is no light and his neon has faded.

But it will return.

And the lovesick man called Rian rises.

Wanting his dead wife to return.

He walks out of the apartment, ignoring the old isolation warnings that beep to him as he leaves.

The emotion junky Rian heads into the streets of Old Cairo City.

To find his dealer.

A dealer in love fragments.

Anything to keep her memory alive.