We sit on the back porch—replaying the scene in which she smokes and we talk about how disenchanted we are by life, how bitter we are about being lost, how much we hate men and sex and working for a living, how much we miss the real drugs. We’ve replicated the entire conversation on the very same porch a thousand times.

She smashes her pain pill and sucks it up her nose with a straw, she does it again while I watch and pretend not to lust after the little white lines that are evenly drawn across her brand new book – the one about the kind of love neither of us understands.

She tells me I look beautiful, I shrug and tell her she’s blind.

I love her. I love her in a way that makes me uncomfortable. A way that causes me to rearrange every single notion I have ever had regarding who I think I am.

We decide to go to church on Sundays. To wear pretty dresses and slip on shoes and beg God to give us back everything we misplaced along the way. To give us back the years we wasted, the time we pissed away with people who owned us, the dreams we murdered for people who only longed to know us in the most mammalian sense of the word.

I regret not moving to New York with her. She regrets coming home.

Fate keeps dragging us back to the same old porch where I wonder, secretly, if I belong.