I did a lot of drugs in high school. Everything depressed me: the dull brown bricks of the school building, the white walls of the flat I shared with my mother, the way the girls at my school left the top button open on their uniforms to draw attention to what they would later feed their babies with. We were no different than animals, pursuing little nests and little families. Preening, pretending to be something we were not to draw a mate, tits pushed forward, lips wet with gloss. Drugs softened the harshness of the world, put a blanket over my senses.

One of my teachers, Miss Mills, saw me strung out in the hallway once and pulled me into an empty classroom to tell me that I had a bright future ahead of me and I was on the fast track to ruining my life. She was the sort that wore her dull brown hair in a low pony every day and looked forward to weekends so she could use her label maker. Her fingernails were always painted, a sign of too much time on your hands. My own fingernails held chipped black polish, bitten down to the quick. In my opinion, she’d already ruined her life, so who was she to judge mine? I’d peeked into her classroom one morning to see if my friend Violet was in there, and I’d seen her bent over her desk shoving biscuits into her mouth. Not even homemade, the kind out of the tin. I used drugs, she used biscuits, practically the same thing. As soon as the words were out of her mouth, I blew her off, laughed in her face.

Nobody said the right things about drugs to kids; the lingo was stale and the arrow dull. Drugs were for right now, right here. When you’re told that you’re going to ruin your life you aren’t in the place to be thinking about the rest of your life. Does it even exist? Maybe you were not excited about the rest of your life because what you’d lived so far had been absolute shit. You just can’t threaten kids with their futures when they don’t understand the gravity of time. I’d stopped doing drugs when I’d come to terms with the world. I had a professor in university that told me that the spectrums of pain were meant to be felt and that they were beautiful in their own way because they caused change. At first, I’d been appalled—who wanted to experience pain? And then I’d thought of all the girls I’d gone to high school with. The ones from the good, wholesome families. They’d already begun the process of setting up families for themselves. In ten years they’d have an identity crisis. They’d be so tightly wrapped up in their husbands and children they’d not know who they were. They’d experience their own pain. My pain had already caused me change, I knew who I was and what I wanted because of it. I made peace with having a bad mother, and not having a father, and I stopped the whole “this isn’t fair” mentality, which caused me to medicate. Sure, life wasn’t fair. A complete no-brainer when you weren’t being a narcissist. But, doing drugs wasn’t going to change my world. Acceptance was. I’d decided I wanted to feel the full spectrum. But, that didn’t include men. Men could make you hurt harder than your parents, or friends, or anything else could. I’d hold them at arm’s length. My drug was wanderlust. I got high by starting over. We always had a drug. We could replace one with another, but humans were addicts.

“Yara…Yara…?”

“Yes?” I was at the window watching the rain fall over the water.

“Sometimes it’s like your body is here, but you’re not,” David said.

I smiled. “That’s exactly it.”

“Where do you go?” he asked.

He came up behind me and kissed the spot behind my ear. I shivered. His warm lips conjured up dirty thoughts no matter where we were or what we were doing. His lips knew how to do things.

“I used to do a lot of drugs,” I told him. “Now I do you. And sometimes I think about that.”

He laughed into my neck, the spicy smell of him all around me.

“Does this life bore you? Living together, the familiarity?” He started to dig his fingers into my ribs in an attempt to tickle me. I wriggled out of his grip and turned to face him.

“No,” I answered honestly. “I bore me.”

“That can’t be possible,” he said.

His tone was light but his expression was serious. In his love for me, he couldn’t fathom the idea of me being boring. He was obsessed with me as he often said.

“I have the same thoughts over and over. I’m tired of it.”

“So stop thinking them, think about me instead.” He leaned in for a kiss, but I turned my head so that all he had access to was my cheek.

“Why didn’t you tell me that Petra came to your last show? That you sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to her?”

It took him a minute to catch up. He was still talking about one thing and I’d moved on to another.

He frowned. “I don’t know,” he said.

I believed him but that wasn’t good enough. I needed him to know.

“You do know and I need an answer.”

“All right,” he said, slowly backing away from me.

He went to sit on the couch and I stayed where I was at the window, facing him. As I watched him work through his thoughts, the strangest image came to mind. An elderly woman who’d come into the bar with her daughter. She’d been wearing a wig but it was crooked, a garish red/pink color. She’d worn a pinky ring, thick and chunky. It looked odd on her age-spotted hand, the skin thin and wrinkled around it. But I liked her right away, the brazenness of her.

“What are you thinking about?” David asked me.

“An old lady with a pinky ring,” I said.

“See, how could you bore anyone, let alone yourself?”

I tried not to smile. “Don’t change the subject,” I said.

He nodded seriously.

“She’s been coming to a lot of shows.”

“A real-life groupie.” I rolled my eyes.

“I knew it would make you uncomfortable.”

“So you’re keeping things from me because you think they’ll make me uncomfortable?” I folded my arms across my chest. I was battle ready. I wanted to fight.

“Yes,” he said. “I’m in the wrong. I’m sorry and I won’t do it again.”

He was a natural diffuser. I wasn’t ready to stop. I felt things and I wanted to express them.

“You sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to her, made her feel special…validated. It’s like you want her to fall in love with you.”

“Come on, Yara…” He turned his face, dismissing me.

“No, you come on,” I said. “That’s exactly what you did.”

“I’m a performer!” he said. “I please the crowd. That’s something you signed on for being with me.”

“No, I signed on to being with you, not your career.”

“It’s a package deal,” he said that through his teeth.

I could hear the ebbing anger and it excited me. David was rarely upset with me.

“I think you have a thing for her,” I said, and David balked. “You have a savior complex, David! You’ve said so yourself.”

He stood up, walked toward the kitchen, away from me, and then stopped.

“Do you even believe what you’re saying?”

“You knew what you were signing up for when you wanted to be with me.”

He looked at me long and hard. “I did,” he said. “I don’t know how any man or woman could grow accustomed to unwarranted accusation. It’s not good for the heart.”

“Why did you sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to her?”

“Because it was her birthday,” he said simply before walking away.

I started to feel the withdrawals right then and there. I’d replaced wanderlust with a human. That was a terrible mistake.

New addiction, new problem.