how we spend our days is how we spend our lives

"You think you'll every have a life without drugs?" I asked him, his hand shaking holding the pipe to his lips. He inhaled sharply, his cheeks indenting and his eyes closing while his eyelashes fluttered like wings. He passed the bowl to the next person, and exhaled into the open air. A few minutes earlier he breathed into my mouth, warm and wet, and I thought maybe I was falling too. I could see how easy it was to lose yourself in a haze of thick, sour smoke and milky thoughts.

He stayed silent, lacing his fingers through my hair. He looked straight at me, his eyeballs big, red and wet. He blinked and a few tears caught the edge of his eyelashes, he took his index finger and wiped them away. I looked at his hands, they looked too old for him. His fingers were wide and calloused from guitar strings and songs he learned from a monastery in France. He used to say that drugs didn't keep him from his closeness with God, so he didn't see anything wrong with it. Maybe I didn't either.

But maybe it bothered me because it felt like he was missing something. He thought there was something that life itself wasn't enough for, that I wasn't enough for, that even God wasn't enough for. He needed something else, something that made everything less real, something that made it okay to say things you didn't mean and never finish your work. Drugs were an escape and a great excuse. He could get away with anything.

He whispered, "I love you." I held his hand adjusted myself sitting next to him so that i could take the bowl from the person next to me and hand it to him. His hands still shook. I thought about hitting, about just letting myself float away to whatever world he was in, that they were all in. But that was a world of numbness and of giving up, a world of the unreal. I preferred the real.

"That doesn't answer my question," I said as he took another sharp, inward breath from the pipe. The lighter's flame was hitting his finger, but the high was worth a burn or two, he wouldn't feel it till the morning, "I asked if you think you can ever live without drugs?"

He exhaled again, deep and long, and the air in the room was slowly enveloped in gray clouds that hit the ceiling and fell again to run along the floor. He put his hand on my hand, and said nothing.