This time last year I was at a dive bar in Miami and this girl invited us back to her house and we were all doing coke and she was like, yeah so I work for the NSA, and we were like, wait what. And she was like, yeah I work for the NSA, and honestly it’s just a lot of us monitoring child porn rings and having people go undercover and infiltrate the child porn rings, and this Orthodox Jewish guy I work with, he has kids, and he is infiltrating this rings and it’s rough on him because he’s, like, having to monitor child porn all day.

And then she’s like, OK so I work for the NSA and I don’t have social media.

And I only use Go Duck Go.

We were on a coke bender for three days, and we had two bags of ket but we thought one was maybe coke but it wasn’t. We gave a guy from Montreal our numbers and it was like he’d never met gay people before but he was our boyfriend on our coke bender. He gave us coke. He shaved his body and we were like, no do not shave your body.

I was texting this guy who was ghosting me after we just hooked up after flirting for, like, two years and he was, like, my ex’s best friend. I thought maybe his love could save me cause I decided to fall in love with him two days after a John raped me. I bought, like, three yellow dresses off Etsy after I was raped because I was like, I should have yellow dresses because I was raped. I wore my yellow dresses around him. I wanted his love to save me. I wish I was a boy who lived in the woods and caught fish every night to eat for dinner. I could never be any of that. I paid a hypnotist six hundred dollars to help me eat fish and it didn’t work. Something happened to me in a past life where, in this life now, I cannot eat fish. I wish I could eat sardines from a tin. I think that is so chic. I am addicted to fantasy and I am addicted to sex and I am addicted to unavailable people and I am afraid of intimacy. I want someone’s love to save me. I beg for it.

My actions hurt someone and I can’t disclose all that happened with that here. I don’t ever want to hurt someone ever again. I burned the sauce I was cooking for my cousin when I learned I had hurt someone.

At the end of the coke bender I woke up and couldn’t remember who I was or what I liked or what I was doing. I had spent the past year hanging out in parking lots. Living in north and south Appalachia. My phone is filled with photos of empty Kmart lots and sunsets. Everything I owned fit in my car. My car was filled with used toilet paper because I peed in a yogurt container in my car. If I went inside somewhere to pee they would find me. They would sell me something. They would get me. I called my therapist and asked them who I was, crying on South Beach. They said to write things down like, “I am a person who,” and I typed out, “I am a person who drives a red truck.”

At my mom’s birthday I got so drunk I spilled a quart of salsa on the carpet in front of everyone at the party. I got more drunk, I got more high, and I told people I was the monster my mother created. They said I looked just like her. She told people I was her mother. In my head I was like, I am a really good daughter because I bought her all these tacos.

It wasn’t all bad. I swam in the ocean with my friends. Celebrated Whitney’s birthday. Did a photoshoot with her and the strip mall caught on fire except it wasn’t a fire but the fire department came anyway. We ate short ribs and mashed potatoes. We drank Cuban coffee and papaya smoothies and walked on South Beach. We watched videos of Barbara Walters. I found a bouquet of roses and had to throw them back into the ocean. They were a part of someone else’s ritual.

When I returned to New York, a small hole tore open into a gaping gash. I threw up bile for twenty-four hours.