She had previous boyfriends and at least one of them dressed very nicely. I was fortunate to be marrying my future with hers. She was 31.
Our first physical connection was through a bauble she gave me the first night. I wore it around my neck and showed a few people before I lost it. Next came the hand job, and then coitus on my childhood bed in a green bedroom. The walls were adorned with printouts of her favorite drawings and a hanging corset, which I found so remarkable with awe I asked her if she made them. Her clothier had made it. My attraction to her was overpowering until that moment of first coitus. I broke into her by lying sideways. I was surprised by the sensation of penetration and I tumbled to the foot of the bed immediately and almost fell off. She thought it was hilarious. Unbelievably, I had found a woman of a culture so mysterious that it seemed I had manifested her out of the insanity of my own thoughts. These thoughts confused me because I knew it was wrong to date her as an eighteen year old the summer after I graduated high school. My own fears were both quelled and kindled by her overt kindness. The last blog post I made up until then mentioned my wariness in a short, cryptic update. I had forgotten about it until this moment, because I feel less overwhelmed now.
Then she was my girlfriend. I lost my job immediately. I was so obsessive about her I couldn’t show up on time.
It was naive when I expected to be able to move out of my Mom’s and get an apartment with her. Expertly she managed the landlord to do her bidding. However, I was two days too late when I delivered the remnants of my check to that landlord, and we didn't get the duplex. I planned to use it as a place for us to have sex. Missing the lease was a mistake which I told her in arguments was the last time on earth when I had any hope for a good future. I wasn’t exaggerating. I believed everything would have been different if we had gotten the place. She said it didn't matter then and it most certainly did not.
Instead we moved in with her mother and Macy’s four children. And she introduced me to the men and the drugs; and I took showers with cameras; and I saw backyard death cellars surrounded by metal fences for perching photographers. The house was characterized by large windows, drug traffic, and school buses created of solid bulletproof titanium from the inside out to protect them from explosions.
I was the fourth one she had introduced to the stimulant which is called by most people Chem 1. She was a Chem 1 dependent. I live now with a prescription to another drug, debian.
The only time I felt jealousy was with her, when she was having sex with Mika in the other room. The conversation between her and him was an unconnected dialogue I could hear while lying in a bed adjacent the garage. They were using Chem 1 by smoking it, and I'm sure they were so extra-human themselves. That's what the Chem 1 does.
"He's been taking a lot of weed,” she said. I couldn’t hear very well. “Don't carouse him. All the people make him afraid. It's been like this for a few days. If he does nothing, then try talking to him about music. I like him. I love him."
I was on the stuff myself. Chem 1 wasn't a good drug for me.
"He thinks he's already dead,” she told Mika.
I also talked with Jed at the house. Who is to say how long I talked with Jed? On Chem 1, time would pass in intervals that feel the same, but are different lengths. Two hours could feel like thirty minutes. He said it was the same with a lot of drugs, but it was most noticeable on Chem 1.
I asked him how they had all gotten together. He said "similar interests," then answered more existentially. "We were brought together by an idea that the truth is there, and you have to work terribly hard to find that out yourself." He picked up a coin from the desk where we smoked.
"What truth?" I said.
"We don't know that, do we? You and me haven't found it yet. We look inside, and outside for answers to these basic questions like, how will we survive?” He rolled the coin across the table. “And where do we get more Chem 1?" he added. "That's a biggie. The addiction is like being mentally sick. If we don't have our medicine, we start, well, obviously seeing stuff and our thinking changes. But I guess it’s more like a pain we feel."
"So it does hurt?" I asked.
"Hell yes, it hurts. Your body feels dead," he said. "Cold and lifeless, and your mind perceives it that way. You could do almost anything for a re-up."
I thought about how the body and mind could feel dead. I had always thought that I would die when I lost willpower, and when didn't want to live anymore that's when the clock would start ticking. I occasionally worried about this and it made me very nervous sometimes. I would try to reinvigorate myself, or heal whatever life essence gave me the power to survive. By managing my perception of myself and trying to get a grip on what risks I was taking at any given moment, things felt safer. The thoughts of being in danger were what confused me. Right then the risk felt pretty high.
"We're all going to die," he said. "The fact is you can preview death with Chem 1. It is a dead drug. We still all do it, but maybe something in the air or water makes us not feel as happy with it as we once did."
I wanted to say his tolerance was responsible for that, but he seemed to have the conviction that the drug itself was dying. We were both intoxicated with Chem 1 and I sat there and entertained the idea. Maybe Chem 1 had no more resources to survive. Maybe it had been alive once, and was dying. I thought, wouldn't that be a good thing? It was a horrible drug.
In the days leading up to then, I had been hallucinating sounds, the noises of men on the roof. I also felt like I was in danger although there was no apparent reason to be afraid. The stimulant effect made me feel like the superhero Batman, especially in the car where my power over myself seemed total and inhuman. When we would nearly crash the car into the carport upon returning to the house, the carport seemed like it was taking the full brunt of my power. The structure was strong, but could it withstand the missiles which followed us?
The kids went to school in the morning, apparently unaffected by our use. I wondered if they felt like superheroes. I used to when I was a kid. Our relationship, by the time fall had ended, was entirely life-long in my mind, as if I could die at any moment and the thing that would have defined me was my girlfriend Macy and Chem 1.