But I’ll never recover that first time. Or that bathroom. I’ll rack up lines and swear I’ll never mainline, trying to recover that first high. Then buy rigs pretending I’m a diabetes patient needing insulin. Skin-pop, needle into the skin but not hitting a vein, not yet. Share a rig with Mario. I’ll run out of money and the clinics will shutter and the country will catch on and my mother will catch on and the pills will dry up completely so Mario will buy from his boy for way cheaper for that first high. I’ll even knowingly buy pandas or heroin stepped on with fentanyl because anything anything anything. To recover that first high. Nobody telling me it will never come. Nobody telling me life will be a daily quest to stave off the sickness and I won’t even feel good anymore. Dope made us sick, then it healed us. Don’t believe anyone who tells you dope isn’t love.

But there is no heroin yet. There is no Operation Shut Down Every Pill Mill. We are far from the dollar-a-milligram to come. We are far from treatment bed after treatment bed after treatment bed, half of them scams, but I don’t know this yet. We are far from my mother screaming she’d lose her life to save mine, she’d lose her life to hear me say I want to live. Mario and me: we are headed to hell hand in hand, but I don’t know this yet. I just know it’s not one Oxy anymore. I just know I’m falling in love too. With it. With him. Becoming the same thing. Falling in love. Falling in love.

Nobody says rising in love.

And the husband with his wife standing before me and the husband says, she doesn’t want to get an eye lift even though I tell her she looks like shit with all those wrinkles. He tells me I’m pretty again and says, give her something that will at least make it better. I lay out the options on the counter, and the woman looks from one bottle to the next and I notice her eyes begin to water and I beg her in my head please don’t cry please don’t cry please don’t cry. She doesn’t cry.

I thought I came here, she says instead, her voice shaking. I thought I—

She doesn’t want to get an eye lift even though I tell her she looks like shit, the husband says.

My hand is shaking and her hand is shaking and all I can think is a needle doesn’t really hurt that much, it’s just a pinch.

When the woman walks away, the husband hands me a blue-black container in its package and says also, he would like to return this.