Till one day I snuck into his room to nab some and he had a Post-it on the jar that said Bro! That’s fkng sus! Stop!

Now I couldn’t ask for help; I was too embarrassed.

Generally hit the ma in situations like this.

But she left for Japan early July and wouldn’t be back till mid-August.

Trump had passed some bill supporting farmers.

You a farmer? Need a greenhouse?

WE GOT YOU.

You find labor, we’ll send parts.

MAKE AMERICA FARM AGAIN.

Only—gotta cash in on this deal by November midterms.

And the weather started to turn in October.

So one of big cuz E’s ex-employers, a farmer, hit him up.

We were the labor.

E came through Wednesday night.

To peel out early Thurs.

I hadn’t been drinking for a minute.

But the minute he pulled up, his energy dictated we were gonna drink.

We were Conroes, and drinking, whenever together, was what we did.

We walked along 41st, to the beer spot, zigging and zagging as 41st dictated.

My socks kept slipping down.

“Diabetes socks” I’d copped at CVS a couple nights back.

Suggested to me a couple weeks back by my neighbor, bigger older church lady across the street, when she saw me sitting on my stoop smoking in slides.

Cankled ankles exposed.

Glistening with Vaseline.

Face hella swollen.

“Oh baby, you gotta raise those feet.”

“Raise my feet?”

“That’s what I do, when my ankles get like that. From standing on them too long.”

“Your ankles get like this? From standing on them too long?”

“Oh yeah.”

“Like this?” I said, looking at them with horror, like they weren’t mine. “Just from standing on them too long?”

“Well that. And the diabetes.”

I didn’t know whether I had diabetes.

But the elastic of my regular socks was making indentations into my ankles.

And the results from a ‘swollen ankles indentation’ Google search suggested, as an antidote, ‘diabetes socks.’

Like regular socks, except without the elastic.

Kept having to stop every couple blocks to pull em up even though my ankles looked twice as wide.

E noticed but didn’t ask about it.

Just said Aw man when I, unprompted, explained what was up.

Expressing or acknowledging or comforting weakness wasn’t our relationship.

Autonomous bae came over with new roomie bae, who’d just moved into roomie bro’s old room.

We drank and kicked it out back, beneath the makeshift cab-over gazebo E and I built last year.

When my thing was building semi-permanent structures to show ex bae I was here to stay.

Even though she’d never once been over.

We sat in a circle around the lopsided table back there.

I lowkey felt like I should be on a hydration IV, how fucked I felt; but everyone else was drinking so I did too.

E did the thing he did socially where he flexed his wit.