I wonder if you remember that time, that time in the early days, when we bought fifty pressed Oxycontin from the dark web and waited outside your parents’ house each morning for the mail truck to come by and when the pills finally came they were stuffed inside an old Build-a-Bear that smelled like cigarettes. We crushed them up on top of your dad’s hard cover copy of Dead Souls which I didn’t know was Dead Souls until you told me it was because it was all in Russian. We crouched in the corner of your closet and insufflated the pale blue powder and you said you could tell there was fentanyl in there because it “didn’t have legs” but I didn’t know what that meant yet.
I also wonder if you remember how our blood got warm and our heads began to spin. We got online and booked a hotel room at Kalahari for the very same night and drove in a daze to Sandusky. We arrived mid-afternoon feeling nothing with pins in our eyes and the hotel lobby smelled like chlorine and grease. When we got up to the room the walls were painted like a Maurice Sendak book and we shut the blinds so kids waiting in line for the outdoor waterslide wouldn’t see us snort the crushed pills. We sat in the room high all night having directionless sex on both twin beds, trying to figure out which we liked better even though they were the same, neither of us reaching a climax, just exploring each other’s bodies for the mere sake of it. You tried to order room service but kept nodding off. We weren’t hungry anyway.
The sun went down then the sun came up and we put on our bathing suits and went down to the indoor water park in delirium. We sat at the plastic tables beside the wave pool looking straight through each other’s eyes wishing we were back in the comfortable hotel room with our pills. We got in the water and I felt my skin burn and I looked at you and you didn’t seem to mind. The hot tub was a non-starter. It felt like it was stabbing my insides. We went back up to the room to dose again and realized we didn’t pack any clothes besides the bathing suits and what we came wearing so we put on the same old clothes again then drifted down to the food court and got a greasy slice of pizza which I promptly vomited back up. I bought a Sprite for us to share from the built-in convenience store because I couldn’t afford two. I wondered where all the windows were.
We walked to the arcade and played a game of skee ball which in a blind intoxicated rage I claimed was rigged. You gave me a kiss on the cheek and agreed with me and your lips were very dry. We went back to the room and had more languid sex. I can’t even call it making love. It was something entirely different. Housekeeping knocked on our door and said it was well past checkout time so we stumbled out into the fresh spring air, piled into your parents’ old sedan and drove back home, swerving across two-lane country highways and the Ohio Turnpike.
By the grace of God we made it back and realized we had no more pills left, so in cold stoic sobriety we ordered fifty more. We wondered what we would do with these half-stuffed Build-a-Bears; maybe we could give them to Goodwill. The next few days we sat in your bedroom with the blinds drawn. You had cold sweats and restless legs so I would pop outside periodically and check the mailbox for the next shipment which seemed like it never was going to come until it did.
I remember those times. Do you remember? It was the start of the bad times for me but it almost the end of the bad times for you. I never got to apologize for that time they took the trauma shears to your vintage Woodward Dream Cruise shirt I was wearing. The problem is that it’s vintage and no longer produced— maybe one of one, even— so we can never replicate it.
If I knew where my life would head after that trip to Kalahari I can’t say whether I would change a thing or not. Would you? I’d love to know. Anyway, it’s cold outside, dreary and raining, and these chrysanthemums are already wilting, so I’ll just place them here on the wet earth and let you watch them wilt. I can’t remember if you like these flowers or not, or if you even like flowers at all.
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Jameson Draper is a writer from Detroit. He currently lives in Baltimore. His work has appeared in Burial Magazine, BRUISER, Hobart and Michigan City Review of Books, among others. He loves his gray cat, negronis and baseball games on summer nights. He is wondering if he could have a bite of your shawarma.