He only opened his eyes because he could.
Tossing around his mattress, that had been uncovered for days, piled with dirty clothes, junk food wrappers, old newspapers and seventeen empty cigarette packets containing ash, he spied Satan, the cockroach he had named so last night, after it flew straight for his mouth, as if intent to enter his body and establish a colony inside for his species, and breed a super cockroach, that would emerge after tearing his body asunder into multiple pieces. He shrugged at these thoughts and swatted Satan away, who crawled inside his open drawer, where he kept his bread and peanut butter. He ate a few pieces of it everyday for breakfast.
Once, a few weeks before, he had been making out with Starr, their bodies as naked as newborns, when he proceeded to smear the peanut butter all over her breasts. Just when they had been about to eat if off each other, Satan had flown at him again, this time aiming for his dick, covered in creamy peanut butter. Starr had freaked out and gotten off him. Just when they had begun to start all over again, Satan, who had disappeared after the initial attack, crawled onto Starr’s thighs, dangerously close to her vagina. Her screams were heard across his entire apartment block, with the result that his neighbors ended up calling the police. Thankfully, the police left after a brief search inside, chuckling to each other about what had happened, nodding knowingly at the peanut butter jar that lay open on his bed, but smelled from their bodies, mostly Starr’s.
He decided to drink beer for breakfast and convinced the local store to deliver it as soon as possible. He was a regular and tipped the store handsomely, which was everyday. Unfortunately regulations around the delivery of alcohol in the state that he resided wasn’t clear yet, but locally, it was too difficult to oversee who was doing what, unless someone was ratted upon for some gains in cash or kind. He wished Starr was in town, with him, but she had gone home to her parents, for an entire month.
She had left a month back and was unreachable.
He wasn’t able to view her Facebook and Instagram profiles anymore. He felt terrible.
He had realized he didn’t know anyone of her friends and neither did anyone of his friends know her, not anymore at least. She was gone, maybe forever. He remembered, once she had told him about a place she had always wanted to go to, to seek solace and soak in the spirit of nature, near the foot of the Himalayan mountains, covered with Pine trees and lush white snow, and wondered if she was there, and simply decided not to come back to the city they called home, for the past seven years, since the time they had met in the final year of college, begun their professional careers and promised to be together forever. He felt crushed, imagining how Satan would look, flattened out beneath his shoes.
He decided to forget about her. But he wasn’t able to, how could he? It wasn’t so easy. He imagined the worst. What if she had been murdered and buried? Had she been declared missing? Unlikely, he would have heard about it by now. But he could never know for sure. He felt like tearing his hair out, what had happened? It was like a potion of his life had been snatched away, something that never happened, an abrupt ending to a soothing choir. “Starr!”, he screamed, in delirium, his breath reeking of beer and bacteria, still unwashed from the previous night. Just then his doorbell rang. He trudged to it morosely.
It was Starr, as radiant as ever.
“What’s up?”, she said, her eyes roaming all over him in disgust. “What have you done to yourself?”
“Starr? I thought you died! Where were you?”
“At my Parents’, I told you so”
“Your phone is unreachable! Why is your Facebook and Instagram deactivated? I thought you blocked me”, he began to sob.
“What? No. Why would I leave you Sins?”, he fell into her arms.
“What the hell happened?”
“I decided to change my name”
“What? Why?!”
“To start afresh! It sounds so cool, right? I’m Shona now. So I threw away my sim and deleted my social handles. Yes, I could have simply changed the names on my social, but I wanted to start anew. You know, only keep the good ones, like you. What have you done to yourself?”
Sins kept sobbing lightly, grateful to have her back. After a few minutes, he went for a haircut, shooing Satan away from the door and into the wilderness of the concrete.
Marijuana Maharaj 