Cold Cocaine Confidentials

Creative non-fiction

Dec 23, 2025

Hi all. This is a short creative non fiction piece that I wrote a few years ago for a creative writing workshop class. I hope you enjoy it! Let me know what you think.

(This is also a sneak peak of my upcoming archival collection!)

Wind is nipping my nose and the tips of my toes and I’m afraid that they might fall off. I have been here, standing, waiting for this bus many times before, and I wish, that at least, in this state, it may be over until the next time the bittersweet frozen state of Mother Earth returns once again to hibernate my vibrance. Our vibrance. Your vibrances.

It seems sometimes that everything loses color here. The earth and the flora and the fauna retreat to their cool tones, and even the beating sun does not bring back the oranges and the reds and waves emanating from the concrete just fixed up last summer. My bicycle’s tires are flat and there are rats in the mudroom, where they gnaw at a plastic container filled with glaciers grounded to dust, only to access our food because the fridge is broken. Our fridge is broken and we have to journey down the basement steps to turn the water back on when we want to take a shower. It leaks too much. I shower too much. My hair pauses in time here, as I stand outside to wait for the bus. I hope my hair doesn’t fall out. Realistically, this probably won’t happen, but the air has taken my hair and put it in one place – seemingly in a corner, in which I must be as well.

The little gray box which gives my skin and my blood the ability to feel more mobile again buzzes as it radiates artificial warmth in the room around me. The waves emanating from the grates that cover the hot wires reminds me of the waves from the concrete. It’s saying ‘hello; you should put some shoes on, lest your skin melts off’. At the same time, it coaxes you so that it may scorch the skin on the bottom of your feet – which is starting to become calloused slightly. But these waves are nowhere inside of this room. The only waves are from the little gray box waiting for you to wrap your hands around the metal bars, set, ready to cauterize this moment. It’s ready to keep the fluid in. Like stitches, yet unable to be unweaved. Unraveled. Unfurled. Revealed.

I love this moment. I can cover my skin comfortably without fear of discovery. I keep myself hidden here, as crisp and nippy as the air may be, I wish to hibernate here forever. I wish for my body to be preserved by the frosted, bitten ground. So that I may stay in this moment, in this feeling, so that I may not ever leave it and it may never leave me. I don’t want the ground to thaw to uncover my hidden secrets, my pains, and my pleasures (as if they are different from each other, or ever would be). I hold secrets in the cocaine that powders the ground, dripping like snot when the sun beats it too hard. It’s too cold to cover bruises.

Fire buzzes in the sky, ready to burst, and beads of liquid salt drip down my forehead. I am running toward the finish line, or I may be at the start. Sometimes I can’t tell whether I’ve already begun. Shoes are pounding on red asphalt, daring to take away the soles that cover the pain I keep in my feet. The pain I store here, covered by laces and mesh, in which I beat into the ground so violently the core of the Earth must be tired, now, of all the things it must hold for me.

I cross the finish line. I’ve made it, I’m here, and I don’t know what to do now. Maybe he was right, saying that the journey sometimes provides more of a rush than the destination. The others cross now, too, and I feel empty. There is nowhere to bury my secrets – my skin is exposed – and I feel the urge to put on a sweatsuit, convince myself I am shivering, and return to the metal grated waves.

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