A prayer

As soon as the drugs cross the blood-brain barrier, I feel them hit immediately, the whole world going fuzzy at the edges. Sinking back into the carpet, my breath slowing, I think I can still hear him talking to me, the words low and melodic but losing meaning as I slide into the somewhere else.

I imagine taking the train from the city to Montauk. Standing on the oceanside cliffs, hair tangling in the wind, our fingers looped together. The beach at 2 am, the heavy fog obscuring where the sea and sky meet like a surreal dreamscape, the waves lapping at our feet. Swimming in the warm water with the night air heavy, humid and silent around us. Pushing wet strands of hair behind your ear as I guide your mouth to mine, our bodies answering each other's unspoken words. I imagine licking the drying saltwater from your skin as you lay in the sand, your eyes closed, your lips parted in exaltation.

You were never mine. But oh god, how I wanted you to be. In the furthest reaches of my mind, under the influence of opiates, I hide in this alternate reality. Oh how we tried, again and again, to transcend the impossibility of us together. The digital garden we wrote into existence to escape the wilds of our loneliness.

In exile now, without your voice in my ear, your words as a promise, I can only return to this make-believe land we dreamed up when I am high. There is a perilous cost, it is a Faustian bargain, of this I am certain and yet, as I feel the warmth spreading into my limbs I can picture you in a meadow waiting for me and in that moment, I know I would give anything to join you.