I was calling him Friend, but that title has evidently expired. I have lots of friends-if the term be used generically- and none of them make love with me on the couch while we watch movies. Friends don’t see me as half of a partnership they have to stake a claim to by the means of physicality. This friend is using this superpower because he thinks I might scoff and saunter off to the next man with a superior sexual prowess: maybe without the glasses and a thicker frame capable of holding me firm while he takes me like a carnal beast.

Okay, no. That is not my Andre, but that isn’t the point. He knows about the cocaine, and if we flip back weeks before the Forrest Gump thing, we will cover how it goes when your new good boy finds out you are a junkie. This drabble is the journey from Point A to Point B.

A few weeks before we attempted to spend time one-on-one, we found ourselves at the local dive of the coworkers at the Hy-vee grocery store. It was an unsettling lot of us squared off in the booth inside. On the way to it I agonized over where I would sit. There was Jake, one of my upper managers from upstairs. He was interested in me once before he heard a classic slut rumor involving another coworker and superciliously placed me beneath him on a social sense as well as a business one. Tag-teaming to pressure cook the night was my ex, Brandon. We only went out for a few weeks, but I was convinced we were “casual but heading somewhere serious”. Not one day after we consummated our relationship on Easter he slept with another girl we all work with. I still don’t give a damn who it was, nor do I resent her as some of my female subspecies tend to do. My hatred was reserved entirely for Brandon. He made me feel like I was a fifteen-year-old girl clinging to a fairytale that sex was special. In the end, we worked together and the awkwardness had to stop. I ended up apologizing to HIM for treating me that way just to bury a hatchet that was not even my own. At the bar that night, I was the well-behaved ex responding well to my training. It was humiliating enough to make me want to scream.

That left only Andre: a social chameleon with these people that would tear him to pieces if they knew who he really was. I supposed that principle applied to me as well. He was probably ingratiating me while sipping on his beer, exchanging glances with the other men, and smirking with them over when I would take a hint and leave.

I sat next to Andre in the booth when Brandon took the spot next to Jake. I didn’t say much;I didn’t need to. These people weren’t interested in my life, but how they allowed me to listen to theirs was an honor. Their exchanges were crass but laced with nothing original: who was high off what when, same goes for blitzed drunk, tinder dates, sex in general. I paid special attention to Andre during this time because something in my mind was calling bluster to this. He actually told me once when he was still with his last girlfriend that they had never actually had sex because it was such a big deal to him. I knew this little snippet about him while everyone else at the bar, I realized, crowned him as “the man” with his 60’s leather jacket and red 1996 Miada. He was doing no wrong. The same form of gossip that flayed me alive was pegging him as a badass Danny Zuko of 2019. It wasn’t deception if he did not correct them.

I spent the next hour testing the rigidity of the box I was in. The walls were giving way; I could break free if I kept pushing. I had to say something drastic to include myself into this community. After the man-whoring subject ran its course it went right to drugs. I wouldn’t have ever guessed I would have a safe space here with this crowd, but alright… It started with a one-on-one talk with Andre while Jake and Brandon went to the bar top to get more drinks. By the time they came back they caught the tail end of my profession of doing meth at this very bar last week. I am not a meth user; it happened ONCE, and it messed me up so profusely I had to talk about it to be sure it actually happened. I was still challenging my reality as to what was real life and what wasn’t. I finished my statement with a strong emphasis on how meth was not cool and that it was definitely not worth doing.

Andre had been listening to me talk so intently he had to snap out of it when the others arrived. He is so stubborn in his need to know things I thought he might hush the two dumbasses so that we may continue speaking about drug use in a sophisticated, endearing way. For the first time that night, he really and desperately wanted to know what I knew. He saw me as a person he could grow through. At that point, all he knew was that I liberally did cocaine, Adderall, oxy, LSD, pot: the Ashbury Street cocktail. But yet I walked like a normal person, talked like a normal person, and blossomed to life like a person that was riding the wave rather than drowning beneath it. Mr. Good Boy’s mind was being blown by what I was. He assumed I had to be levels of fucked up. For someone to do so many drugs recreationally just to add a little spice to the everyday could not be. He needed to dig deeper to find the gaping hole in my Titanic that was gradually capsizing the boat.