Opium smells awesome. I’ve never been crazy about the smell of flowers, or really about smells at all, but when that rose smoke fills a room there’s nothing to do but lie back and take it in. I didn’t know that opium was still a thing that people did, but at least tonight it seems like everybody is smoking it. I guess this isn’t a normal crowd, though; in addition to the standard beer bongs and kegstands everyone is also crushing up Lorazepam and snorting it. At least here I can down a bag of potato chips and not feel bad about it: they’re gonna die before me pretty much no matter how badly I neglect my health.

A few months ago they lived somewhere else, a house with a balcony, and they took ecstasy, and I stood on the balcony in the pleasantly warm and breezy Minnesota summer night with my back against the railing looking into the house, and through the thick fog of smoke I watched their shadow bodies move in ways that I was not used to seeing the bodies of my friends move: fluid, dynamic, enthusiastic, graceful. Standing next to me, also with her perfect back against the railing, was a girl whose name I did not yet know. She bounced subtly on her feet to the music and smoked her cigarette and had a smooth round face and black hair, and it was very dark outside—not so dark I couldn’t see her clearly but dark enough that her skin looked the same grey as mine and not the beautiful caramel it is in the light. And then she turned to throw her cigarette down off the balcony into the grass below and her arm rested against mine for what seemed to me to be an impossibly long time while we watched the ashes glow in the black grass and I was possessed by a consuming desire to tell her that I thought she was beautiful. And then I silently watched her walk back inside.

And then the thrill, a week later, when she remembered who I was: “Hey, you’re that guy who is really good at Donkey Kong!”

And now she spins alone in the center of the room, everyone else too into the relaxing downswing of their pretty-smelling opium to dance, her skirt flaring almost parallel to the floor, the room heavy with music, scratchy synthetic melody running circles around pumping beats, and here I am, the only clear mind in the house, watching her, thinking about how mad it made me to hear her call herself fat in that smooth high voice, watching the slight curves of her torso, her minutely convex belly, wondering how a body could be better made. And as the night passes by (and it strikes me as unbelievable that four, six, eight hours have passed since I got here) she sinks more and more into drunkenness, and I feel the same consuming desire to grab her by the shoulders and look right into her face and tell her that she is not fat, that anyone would be blessed to have a torso as slender as hers, not flat but curved so slightly as to suggest a wonderful softness. That she should thank her Allah for her perfect little belly. Even as she sinks past the point where she registers anything anybody says I keep telling myself I’ll tell her. And then she leaves, and I just think about her spinning with a longing that is unnamable—not for sex, though maybe for touch, but mostly just for her beauty, for a beauty that I can never come that close to for any number of reasons (god, alcohol, personality and pre-existing relationships, just to name a few), or maybe a longing for nothing at all, maybe it’s just an emptiness in my chest trying in vain to be filled by a beautiful, sad picture of a drunk girl dancing alone.