The medical definition of addiction is "a psychological and physical inability to stop consuming a chemical, drug, substance, or activity."

Personally, I think everyone is an addict.

Have you ever seen anyone go through caffeine withdrawal? My freshman year of college, my roommate decided to give up caffeine as part of some hokey Instagram "detox," and I swear he had the shakes for a week, like a junkie desperate for a hit. What followed was uglier than roadkill on a hot summer day.

Gambling addictions triggered the same exact brain areas as drug and alcohol use did, and I witnessed the hysteria of some of those guys when I went to inpatient rehab last year. Nothing made you more crazed than money (or lack of it), and they made my dope benders look like a sunset walk on the beach.

There were people who were addicted to sex. While that wasn't me, I was probably addicted to having sex with Sage Heller specifically, despite the fact that she was quite possibly the worst human being on Earth. After years of going back and forth between her and I, I learned I wasn't really any better. That's probably why despite everything, I was still the first person she called when she came home from college for the summer. It was nearly midnight by the time I slipped through her bedroom window, and it should have felt nostalgic, but something sour sat in the pit of my stomach.

Sage's designer duffle bags still littered the plush carpeted floor of her bedroom, heaps of clothes haphazardly strewn like confetti. We filled the room with smoke before it whooshed out the open window and traded pills in each other's mouths. It ached when she kissed me, but it ached more when she didn't.

"I really did miss you."

I exhaled smoke out of her window before turning myself back around on her cushioned window seat. She sat up in bed, working her fingers through her sex-swept mess of hair. The light of the moon turned her bloodshot eyes to crystal.

"Did you?" I asked, turning back to the window and taking another hit of the blunt.

She scoffed. "Don't be like that, Kai."

Don't be like that. Sage Heller lingo for don't ask questions you don't want the answer to. I shouldn't have cared, but despite all the distance we had tried to put between us, we found ways to keep clawing our way back to each other. It wasn't like we'd be good for anyone else.

"Come back to bed." Sage patted her comforter on the open spot beside her.

I did as she asked, but I didn't sleep, my bones and my head rattling as I came down from a swirling high. I was sure by now that my body hated me and all my shit life choices and constantly found ways to remind me of that.

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I slipped out of Sage's bedroom before dawn, plucking my skateboard from behind the azalea bushes that lined the white lattice privacy fence surrounding their overly manicured yard. I unlocked the back gate and trudged through the sand dunes and marram grass (even though there's a thousand signs that say not to do that) until I reached the quiet haven of the beach. I'd always been told I had an addictive personality, and while I craved the normal things like dope and cigarettes, I also craved the peace of the ocean in the early mornings. Some fucking balance to keep me teetering on the edge.

I took one last look over my shoulder at Sage's house, towering on its six feet of stilts above the beach and piercing the hazy morning sky with its obnoxious shade of coral. It was a place I'd been a million times but still felt unfamiliar.

It took almost three miles and four cigarettes to get from Sage's house back to mine. At some point on my walk of shame, still dragging my skateboard and a cloud of smoke behind me, I sat into the sand and shut my eyes. Before I knew it, dawn melted into mid-morning, and I'd melted into the sand.

When you were coming off a bender and you woke up soaking wet and hot, it usually meant one of two things - you had broken a dope sick fever sometime in the middle of the night and were lucky enough to have sweated it out, or you weren't so lucky and you pissed yourself because you have no control over your body's raging war with your shitty life choices. One thing that usually didn't come along with soaking wet and hot was a hand on your shoulder and a voice in your ear that maybe, quite possibly, was an angel.

"Hey..." she shook me again, and even though she probably didn't mean to, it made the aching in my arm worse.

I tried to open my eyes, but the glare of the morning sun turned everything into a blurry mess of colors. I shut my eyes again in an attempt to soothe my pounding head, the overly pungent smell of low tide churning a storm in me. After slowly trying to adjust to the sunlight, I looked up into a pair of blue eyes so icy, I felt a real chill hit my body. Her face was tanned from the sun with a spattering of freckles, and her cinnamon colored hair was so long it brushed against my chest when she leaned over me. She wasn't the intense, manufactured beauty I was used to with Sage. She was soft, kind of like the first breeze of the morning before it got bogged down by the heat.

"You okay?" she asked in a clipped tone. There wasn't an ounce of the southern proper drawl I was used to hearing from people around here. She squinted down at me and pressed her lips into a pout, like she was trying to figure out what kind of animal I was all washed up on the beach.

"Yeah, I'm fine," I muttered, gripping sand still cold from the night between my fingers to force some feeling back into them. I heard her scoff in response.

Still in sensory overload, the smell of vanilla and coconut wafted off of her, and it made my stomach ripple. Whether it was nausea or something else got lost in the morning haze. I swallowed hard and tried to regain my focus. I managed to sit myself up, and she sat back on her knees. Her light, glass-like eyes glinted with the same silent, curious worry that I had grown used to from everyone else around our tiny beach town, but I had never seen her before. Was she someone's cousin, or niece, or half-sister, and had whispers of "that Danford kid who can't get his shit together" already reached her ears?

"Are you sure you're okay?" She tilted her head to the side, firing off words too quickly for me to process. It wasn't the usual sad pitying I was used to, but it wasn't unkind either. It was just plain curiosity. "Do you need help getting home?"

I shook my head and jerked my thumb over my shoulder. "I live right over there."

I knew without even needing to truly look around. Back in high school, I had marked a couple of big rocks by the boardwalk that led from my house to the beach when I had a short-lived relationship with graffiti. They stuck up out of the sand right behind her, the colors faded but still visible, half-coated in seaweed.

"I uh..." I cleared my throat, trying to get some life back into my mouth so I didn't sound completely strung out. "I must have just fallen asleep on my morning walk. I'm okay, really."

"Well, sorry for disrupting your nap then." She rose to her feet, brushing sand off her leggings. I expected her to turn away, but she didn't, lingering with that same curious look.

"You know..." she pinched her lips into a frown. "In theory, you're probably a really good liar."

I was so gobsmacked by her words, I felt myself tripping over my own in an effort to respond. "I'm sorry, what?"

"Your eyes," she said. "When people feel guilty about lying, it's always in their eyes."

She turned away before I had a chance to bite back (though I really didn't know what I could say at that point) and continued her run down the beach. I itched at a scab on the inside of my arm, took a deep breath and hoisted myself to my feet. Sand came flitting off my knees and my elbows, little pieces of me eroding away like the ocean stripped away the shoreline, pulling it all into the depths.

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any thoughts or feelings on chapter 01 are welcome!