95% of people in my life interact with me only on the most superficial basis. That is customer service. It is networking with total strangers for no other motive than to get them what they want from a company. Coworkers, same. Supposed friends, might as well be the same. But Friend and I have something so three-dimensional it creates life: not just my life or his life, but a shared one that would shrivel and die without both of us to keep nurturing it together. Friend is reserved at first, but then invites me into this new universe aside from my hellish one by putting an arm around me during a movie. Is he thinking this too? Too lucid, too real! I tuck another chunk of coke in my gums and wash it down with coffee. I run back to the couch. Friend is still there, and he is watching me. My energy and enthusiasm amuse him. He had an ex that weighed on his happiness, and I am supposedly not much like her.

Sweet Jesus, already I am losing faith in him. Maybe he didn’t even remember placing his arm around me. Do I ask? Am I insane? I made up the whole thing? I am losing it: obviously losing it, all the while onscreen Forrest listens to Bubba talk about the shrimping business. But wait…no wait, it’s happening again! He puts his arm around me in such a way that my head must rest on him. This time I latch on to Friend like a cozy leech. My senses are heightened. I must make everything black and white to understand. Hot and cold: yes, I understand hot and cold. The air is like the needle-prick chills one experiences with the flu. Friend’s fingertips stroking my arm tease like little flames. He resumes this absent-minded activity and only switches it up to touch a new part of me.

What else can I understand in this haze? Pressure! Yes, pressure…His touch becomes more assertive as though he is trying to pull me into him with the mere strength in his fingers. It’s a driven kind of energy borne from the most primitive part of the brain. It’s not about overthinking anymore, but about two living things discovering entertainment exists in one another. I need space to overthink some more, but I can’t resist the need to play with-to physically stimulate- another person.

The tv is the focal point of the room, but he turns towards me in a way that would make it incredibly inconvenient if his motive was to watch Forrest carry off Lieutenant Dan. Back to hot, cold, and pressure. The air he exhales on to my neck is all of those things. It drives me crazy: absolutely crazy to the point I will die if I can’t love this other life form with all I have. I throw myself into the game he started. I kissed him with conviction because my body needed something to do. My self-destruction was evident because Friend already had me when he kissed me back in equal fervor. He tilts his head slightly and wraps his arms around my lower back so that we can make out more effectively, more voraciously.

We do this for a long time. We explore each other in the way everyone secretly wants to be explored. He kept stopping to look at me with rounded eyes that suggested this was a big deal to him. The vulnerability between us was so saturating that I melted into him more and more. I imagined how this would be perceived if I were to share with Friend how special this encounter was for me. He would tear out of my house like a bat out of hell at the mere whiff of a dumb girl donning the white for every boy that kisses her. It wasn’t like that. Friend specifically was not my everything, but the fact that I recovered my physicality through him was. It didn’t matter who he was or what his reasons were for kissing me. It all came down to my affection for this world. All the times I needed to die were as irrelevant as though they were the desires of someone else: someone broken and messed up. Who was that person again? I had Friend now to take care of me.

Before he came over, I couldn’t breathe the air that was all around me. I was suffocating in my own home, in my own safety. I couldn’t remember how it was to not be shaking. I couldn’t make peace with the living world because I challenged my reason to believe I was still in it. Maybe I left that behind for good the first time I inhaled cocaine and forced my body to love the very thing it rebelled against so strongly. That first time I held a line of coke in a saucer, the scent of it even from a distance was foreign. It could not come from this planet, and therefore, my body was afraid. My throat closed up, and my body tensed into my chair like a trapped animal. When I overrode my body with my brain and achieved the high, well…the psychologic damage was permanent. My body became a subdued trail horse plodding down the trail my spirit was blazing for it. The spirit has no limit and forgets its fragile costume it must be tethered to in this life.

Through Friend, my body has taken the lead in the race against my spirit: once two sides of the coin but now two incomplete coins. But my spirit is pacing itself in second while my body is sprinting like a mad demon to preserve its lead. It isn’t long before the body high breaks down on itself and the spirit inevitably passes with the “good job” courtesy exchanged between runners in a race.

It is 2am, and Friend has to leave me. I have a bad feeling about this. I won’t address it, but I know my blithe happiness is already expiring. He will lose interest, he won’t come back, he will find some new entertainment because he has no idea what this experience was for me. There is no way I can tell him! There are social rules cruelly enforced about saying too much soon. I have made this mistake several times before. My last boyfriend-thingy felt righteous in abandoning me because my emotions set free can only be perceived as “desperate: she will get in bed with anyone”. The sheer malarkey in that observation makes me hate everyone and everything. Friend, too, is not exempt. I need him to back me up from my ledge- but I don’t trust him. Not in the slightest. All his promises not to abandon me are just more reasons that he will.