Escape
He sat wrapped in blankets on the couch with a bag of candy and a soda sitting untouched beside him. In his hand he held a balloon, bright pink with blue swirls on it. He’d been holding it for 20 minutes now, waiting for the right moment. Intently, he stared at the TV. He had seen this movie before and thought it was shallow and boring. After all, it was a movie meant for kids. Right now though, he loved it. Rather than being annoyed by the cheesy and predictable plot, he lived experienced the sadness, happiness, excitement, and failures of the characters as though he  embodied them. He glanced around and once again noticed the blankets he had draped from the ceiling six hours ago that reminded him of what would hang above the bed of a princess. The light from the windows flitted through the cracks between the blankets as they gently swung from the currents in the air. The light cast bright, beautiful moving shapes on the blankets on the wall.
It looked just like when he was a kid. Back when he used to watch the sun coming through his bedroom curtains. He always got up early to watch the sunrise and the shapes it made. After all, the people around him never were quiet. Every night they yelled and screamed and fought. Back then, he didn’t understand. He didn’t understand why one of them didn’t leave, after all they obviously hated one another. But it didn’t matter. They stayed together. They fought. And he woke up early.
Every morning, he would watch the light makes shapes on the walls. The curtains were tattered, but that just made the light create strange shapes. It amused him to think of stories and lives for the shapes. One was a knight defending the innocent. Another: a villain, bent on destroying cities and terrorizing the innocent. Those stories were his favorites. But his bookshelves were bare, and the TV hadn’t worked in years, so there wasn’t any competition. Every morning, his mom would come in, smile at him, and tell him he shouldn’t be up so early. That he needed his sleep to grow big and strong.
Then she stopped. He hated the day she stopped. That was the day he left. They’d yelled and screamed and fought for as long as he could remember. Every night was the same. He tried to not listen. If he did his dad would get angry again. Still though, he heard so much of it; he couldn’t help hearing. He never caught entire sentences, and sometimes he didn’t understand what they were saying, but every night he heard his name. Sometimes it was yelled, other times whispered, and sometimes sighed, but it was always present. Maybe it’s a good thing, he tried to think, but he never believed himself. Even when we was young, he knew, just in the way they said it, that it wasn’t a good thing.
“Calvin”
Every night he heard it. He wished they would stop yelling. Why couldn’t they just go to bed? Instead they kept fighting every night. But that night, the night that stopped his mom from coming in the next morning, they stopped fighting. They were yelling, louder than usual. His name pierced through the thin walls and echoed around his head. They kept yelling louder and louder. Then, everything stopped. Neither of them spoke. Instead, his mom started to cry. Quietly. After a moment, he heard his dad walking across the apartment with his signature heavy footsteps. Towards their room. For what seemed like eons, there was just a slight rustling and quiet crying. Then his father walked back across the apartment, towards the front door, and slammed the door behind him. That morning, his mom didn’t come into his room. She didn’t tell him he should be sleeping. She didn’t tell him not to wake up early to watch the sunrise and the shapes of light it made. He waited for her. While he waited, he stared at the shapes the sunrise made on the wall. He tried to think of stories for them, but nothing came. And neither did his mom. After the sunrise had long ended, he walked out of his room. His mom had her head resting on the table. Her mascara was smeared, her clothes rumpled. Her chest rose slowly as she slept. He shook her. She needed to get up. She needed to get to work. She needed to get ready. She needed to change. She needed to make his lunch. She needed to get up.
She stirred, looked at him, and tears flooded her red eyes.
“Calvin…”
His whole body shuddered at the memory. He shook his head in an effort to clear it. Glancing back at the TV, he realized, that without him noticing, the movie had approached its climax. As the scene began, he emptied his lungs and brought the balloon to his mouth, not wanting to waste the opportunity. He breathed deeply from the pink balloon until it was empty and the blue swirls were shapeless among the folds of the balloon. Holding it in made his lungs feel as though they may burst at any moment, but he endured. After all, that’s the most effective way. As it hit him and altered his already intoxicated state of mind, the sound from the movie came in indecipherable bursts of sound while the geometric hallucinations from the movie turned into fractals that broke countless more fractals and so on until it filled his vision. He saw double, triple, and sometimes unintelligible images as he sat there. Time both seemed to stretch uncontrollably and stop haltingly as he stared at the multicolored hallucinations emanating from the TV. When the high wore away, taking with it the colorful fractals, he realized there was drool dripping off his chin onto the blankets wrapped around him. He wiped it away and reached for the bright pink balloon that had fallen from his hand in the moments before. He slipped the cannister over the end of the navy blue cracker that was worn from years of use and took out the empty canister. Frost gathered on the freezing canister – his mind distantly recalled from chemistry class that the rapid loss in pressure caused it to lose heat which then condensed and froze the moisture in the air – as he dropped it in the growing pile of used canisters.
“Clink.”
It sounded just like when he was a teenager. He and his friends would skip school and sneak out at night. He had to tiptoe downstairs to snatch a six pack from the fridge while his mom was sleeping. It was either that or his friends wouldn’t let him come, so what choice did he have? He would meet up with them in the alley behind his house and walk down to the end the street. Then they all would jump the fence that enclosed the abandoned house. Years ago, a young pregnant couple began to build it, but the woman miscarried and they sold the lot. It stood derelict. Boarded up windows made the inside of the house pitch black. The light permeated through parts of the damaged attic. Starlight shone through large gaps in the roof  that were a result of addicts taking pipes, kids messing around, and rain slowly wearing through the wood. It was strewn with cigarette butts, and used needles. The two former were in part from him and his friends. The moon would rise up during the night and shine through a large hole in the roof. The light glinted off the empty glass bottles piled in the corner. They never cleaned up, so the pile built up as they skipped school and continued sneaking out. After a while, the large pile became a source of pride for them, a memento of sorts.With the holes in the ceiling, just enough light came through that the teenagers could see and successfully avoid the exposed nails, incomplete sections, and decaying flooring. Even so, occasionally Calvin would get drunk and scrape himself on something, put his foot through the floor, or hurt himself. Most of the time he was too drunk to notice, feel it, or care. Sometimes though, it hurt. Sometimes, it hurt like hell. Whenever it hurt, he’d curse, down another beer, and throw it in the growing pile of empty bottles. After all, he thought, what’s better than a painkiller that also makes you tipsy? And so another bottle would fly through the air towards the large pile. As the bottle flew through the air and he swallowed his last gulp, he would laughed and stumbled over to his friends. Every time one of his bottles landed on the pile, it made the same sound:
“Clink.”
The noise tore through his thoughts like a rusty nail. “Clink.” He shifted to move away from the pile, but the pile shifted too. “Clink. Clink. Clink.” It brought him out of the fantasy world conjured by the TV that he had been in moments before. “Clink.” It and the pile of used canisters reminded him that the movie and his memories weren't the reality around him.
He looked around.
For the first time in the last six hours, he noticed the empty apartment around him, the dirty old pillows and blankets that surrounded him, the trash that had collected around where he had been sitting for hours. Suddenly, the movie lost its magic. The room and blankets draped from the ceiling didn’t make the room look magical, instead they were simply dirty blankets crudely taped to the ceiling and walls to block out the light from the windows, but the light from the rest of the world still managed to shine in on him and on the walls. The room around him felt grimy. It felt empty. To him, the room was no longer part of a magical fantasy; nor was it simply another place to sit; now it felt like a deep abyss. He shunned these feelings and realizations that came over him. He simply wanted to go back to that magical feeling from before. That was all he wanted anymore. So he loaded another cannister into the cracker. As he put the end on the cracker, he noticed blue paint from it rubbed off onto his hand.
“There’s blue on my hand…”
“Yeah, that’ll happen,” a voice said, seemingly from a distance, “It probably causes cancer.”
The voice startled him; he had forgotten that he wasn’t alone, but the realization somebody else was with him was of little comfort, because the words said disquieted him. They were clearly meant to be sarcastic, but it didn’t matter. His thoughts sank with the realization of the grimy, empty apartment around him, the blue paint on his hands from the old worn cracker that now – at least in his head – would slowly kill him, and that he had been sitting here for six hours without ever getting up or moving save to load another cannister into the cracker or to wipe away the drool off him that gathered whenever he took another hit. Thoughts raged across his mind without restraint, wreaking havoc on whatever happiness had been falsely manufactured in the previous six hours. The fantasy he had been living was gone. The apartment, his happiness, the magic of the movie, the feeling of wonderment, everything, was gone and now felt empty, grimy, and, above all else, fake. He closed his eyes. The urge to leave this place, to clean himself of this dirty, empty, and manufactured reality was insufferable. But he didn’t get up. He didn’t leave. He didn’t scorn the drugs he’d used to synthesize happiness. He didn’t even think about the reality that was apparent around him.
Instead, he refused to think.
He put his hands on the cracker, twisted, and watched the pink balloon inflate. The blue swirls were visible again. He gently shook the cracker out of habit and took off the balloon. He paused for a second and looked at the light leaking in through the curtains and blankets. The light and shadows cast on the walls. The way the shapes played across them. Then he put the balloon to mouth and the blue swirls disappeared once again as he breathed in deeply...