The One About Friend Grief (part 4)

The quest for the center of all love.

(For best results, read the other parts: 1 2 3 ♡)

Valentine’s Day 2014.

I guess this is my first real Valentine’s Day as an adult, the first one of my first “adult relationship.” I should be excited. And I am, but less for the holiday than I am for what N and I have planned for the day after.

M is gone for the night, home somewhere in the Pittsburgh area visiting his parents. To the naked eye, it looks like he went away for the night to let N and I spend a romantic Valentine’s Day alone in their shared dorm room, but while it’s a convenient secondary benefit, it isn’t the motivator for this trip.

M is buying us some acid. Buying it or picking it up from some address where he’d had it sent over, I was never quite sure about the logistics. But this is the real reason N and I find ourselves alone together on Valentine’s Day, and at least in my case, it’s the reason I’m struggling to stay in the moment and enjoy Valentine’s Day with my boyfriend.

Underneath the excitement is a whole lot of fear. There are many unknowns, and that’s without factoring in the dozen D.A.R.E. scare-tactic urban legends that are now bouncing around between my ears. That guy who spent the rest of his life believing he was a glass of orange juice and someone was going to pour him all over the floor. The kind of thing that seems more terrifying without a reference point, because you don’t even know what it would be like to suddenly come into that kind of belief, let alone be stuck with it forever. Not to mention the fact that part of me only asked to be included in these plans because I was afraid of M and N sharing an experience—especially a particularly profound one—without me. I couldn’t stomach the thought of my best friend and boyfriend, whom I loved dearly and dare I say perhaps equally, giggling to themselves in some faraway corner, in on some secret they would have no language for, no way of including me. Another outgrowth of not just needing to be loved but to be the center of all love, the orienting point for all meaningful emotion happening around me. Despite the fear, I knew I would not fare well being a spectator to their shared little world, worse than I’d fare being a glass of orange juice for the rest of my life.

While walking around campus after our Valentine’s Day dinner, N and I find a pile of My Little Pony Valentine’s cards stacked up on a fence post. Though he has always denied it, we know M is a My Little Pony fan, so we scoop the cards up as a surprise for him the next morning. It’s a way of including M in our love, something that deep down I know is somehow weird or perverted of me to want but I want all the same.

When we wake up the next morning, the prospect of this trip seems more exciting, more terrifying, and more real. I recall a moment a few days before when I was walking to the only ATM on campus to withdraw $20 to pay M for the acid. I was far from sold on the whole idea but sure I’d regret not at least having the option to trip when the moment came. As a sheltered teen who had only recently evolved into a somewhat-less-sheltered young adult, using campus resources to obtain cash to buy drugs with was an almost unbearable thrill, and I calmed myself down with the reminder that none of this was in any way a commitment, I didn’t have to actually take the acid if I didn’t want to, there was still time to bail. Was there still time to bail now, the morning of? Why hadn’t my conscience intervened yet to make me chicken out? Where was that moment of integrity, wisdom, whatever natural law I was convinced would kick in and rescue me when I was about to do something potentially dangerous and totally beyond the pale? Surely it would come now, watching M step through the door of Room 420, throw his hoodie on the bed, and pull three acid-dipped sugar cubes wrapped in foil from his backpack.

If not then, now, helping N and M pack the car with guitars, art supplies, food, pajamas, whatever strikes our virgin minds as vital to the psychedelic experience. Or wandering the CVS for magic markers and “flavor-morph” Starbursts we expect will be enhanced by the chemicals we’ll soon ingest.

Or sitting in the McDonald’s on Buffalo Road, knowing that this is our last stop before docking at 632, the chosen destination for our trip.

The parking lot. The stairs. The door to the apartment that I step through like an auspicious threshold you can only cross once, my better judgment failing for the last time to intervene. We’re in a new reality, now. At least it’s a shared one, like I wanted.