My eyes close tight. This feeling of being unmoored is awful now, but it’s the same one I used to chase. I could take or leave alcohol, but I’ve always loved being high.

Skunky weed in a joint under the football field bleachers on a Friday night because that was what everyone did. After school before my parents got home. Eventually, I started to smoke up in the mornings before class. I would float, float, float, until the world crashed back in around me and I started thinking about the next time I could smoke. I wasn’t depressed. I had friends and nice parents and teachers who mostly liked me. I just really, really liked being high.

The first time I ever got stoned on downers was with Christian. He stole his mother’s “little helper” from her dresser. It was different from smoking. A tiny little bit of bitterness on the tongue, and after a while, bliss. Serenity. I liked living in a haze, moving from moment to moment with nothing being able to penetrate it. I didn’t care about anything, because I couldn’t care about anything.

Years later, finding a doctor to prescribe something similar had been easy enough, at least at first. Because that’s what they do, don’t they? Tell women we are supposed to be happy with our lives, and when we aren’t, a pill will make it all better … only needing the pills means we are bad wives and mothers, which then makes us feel even more miserable, which means we want and crave the pills that take away the pain we aren’t supposed to feel.

I have not been high since Eli was in kindergarten.

I have wanted to be high every single day since then, but it wasn’t until Christian showed up back in my life that I actually felt like I might slip back into those old, bad habits. Right here in my bedroom I want to fall onto the cold floor with my face pressed to the worn carpet and never get up again.

I go into the basement, but not to knock on Ken’s office door. I can hear a low murmur of voices, some music. He’s watching a video. It doesn’t sound like porn. I wouldn’t care if it was.

In the powder room that’s also the laundry room, I check the envelope tucked behind the drainpipe. It rattles as I ease it free. My mouth puckers with the remembered taste of the glue I licked to shut it. The flap gapes, now, and a single pill slips free. It bounces on the bottom of the cabinet, and I watch it disappear into the hole around the drainpipe. I try to feel for it, but my fingers come away stained with rust and cobwebs. I can’t get them deep enough into the space to find a small pill.

And that’s where I am. Willing to stick my fingers in a dark hole for the possibility of finding a pill amongst the dirt and bugs. And then what? Would I put that dirty pill on my tongue, let it dissolve, tasting of mouse shit and desiccated millipedes? I disgust myself.