Each weekday morning, sometime between ten and eleven, I’d crawl out of bed, pick a t-shirt and jeans from the pile of laundry on the floor, grab my “I LOVE NY” tote off the door handle, and pour myself the dregs of my mom’s stovetop espresso. I’d rifle through my bag for my pink cat-eye sunglasses, check to make sure I had my travel-size bottle of mouthwash and vial dripper, take my coffee into the car, and drive to my sister’s apartment. I’d arrive after she’d gone to work. I’d put my stuff down on her coffee table, change the tv from videos of birds to Monster or Lain, eat Goldfish off my stomach, and throw treats at the kitten.

Eventually, I’d grab my tote and take out the bottle of mouthwash and vial dripper. I’d unscrew each cap and put the dripper in the liquid. I’d place anywhere between five to fifteen drops under my tongue, depending on how I was feeling. I’d open Spotify on my computer and put Charles Bradley’s cover of “Changes” on loop, pick up the kitten, and sway with her in my arms. “My heart was blinded,” I’d sing. “Love went astray.”

I’d lie on my sister’s couch with my feet up on the wall and my head hanging off the cushion. I’d make eggs and bacon or go through my sister’s room. Until I cat-sat for her, I didn’t know she owned so many pairs of green, lacy underwear, or had dozens of true crime novels on her Kindle, or kept Kodak photos of our old family vacations in boxes above her closet. I liked to sort through the pictures and take out the ugly ones of me as a kid. Back then, I hadn’t realized that if I smiled with my mouth open, my cheeks became square and added five pounds to my face. I threw these out.

At some point, my sister would text me, (“how’s my baby?”) and I’d send her a photo of her tabby. She was seven years older and led marketing for a tech start-up. She worked long hours and paid me to cat-sit for her in the afternoons. It was a “win-win,” she told me. I could get some cash until I got a “real job,” and Nala would have someone to keep her company. Besides her, my mom, my dad, and Naomi, I didn’t talk to anyone. I ignored the messages I got from friends, even though just six months ago, I’d showered with my phone in a plastic bag and responded to texts as they came in.

Once the acid hit, I’d take the kitten for a walk in the courtyard. The apartment complex had ten units, with a central succulent garden covered in white rocks, and a few rusted chaise longues for sunbathing. I didn’t tell my sister I took her kitten outside. But Nala seemed to like it, and it wasn’t like she could escape. I’d carry her down the stairs and drop her next to the aloe vera plants. I’d caress each stem, grabbing them between my thumb and forefinger to wipe the dust off. It was really important, I’d heard, to live in the moment. And when I was high, it actually felt kind of good.

I’d press my palms against individual rocks, holding them to the heat until my eyes watered. I’d breathe deeply and stare at their rough outlines, wiggling, waving at me, asking me to leave, to do something else, to get a grip. I’d sit there for an hour. I got tan this way. It helped me look less depressed. My family thought I was going out with friends, and not spending the entire day at my sister’s place. And then the kitten would walk up, running her flank along my arm, and I’d take her inside, and we’d watch tv until just before my sister returned. I always left before she came home.

Days passed like this. And then weeks.




I flew home after college. I didn’t get a job. But before going back to Arizona, I stayed with my boyfriend, whose family took me in the summer after graduation. The two of us had gotten drunk at bars in New York for three months while I was supposed to be applying to jobs, so by the time September rolled around, I’d submitted six applications and gained eleven pounds.

Back when I stayed at his house, my boyfriend and I would have sex once or twice a day. The thing is, I didn’t even really want to. Most of the time, when we got naked, I participated only to get it over with, to go along with his desire and keep the relationship amicable. He would get insecure if we went a day without sex, asking if I still liked him. Even when I got a UTI and had to be prescribed antibiotics and let my body heal, he took it personally. Like I did it on purpose so I didn’t have to sleep with him. Even if I went through the motions of sex, he knew my desire was in a drought, and took my indifference as an affront to his ability to seduce. He accused me of being distant, of not loving him the way he loved me. I never knew what to make of this accusation: I cared for him as best as I could, given the circumstances.

I suspected that he knew I was there for the proximity to New York, and so I could hang onto college for a few more months. In the afternoons, he would teach me scales on the piano. We cooked food together, and he showed me how to make a hollandaise sauce and beef bourguignon. I like his candor, and how easily compliments rolled off his tongue. He’d tell me I looked good before we went out with friends, and insisted I was warm and charismatic throughout the evenings, even though I couldn’t help but become especially cold and quiet as I drank. One time I threw up outside a bar and he carried me home on his back. I mumbled in his ear that I really appreciated it and passed out. I knew what demonstration of love he lacked, but I wouldn’t let myself see it. When he dropped me off at the airport, he lingered and stared into my eyes, saying how much he’d miss me. I picked at my nails and nodded, my stomach turning. I broke up with him the day after I flew home.




One image from that summer sticks with me: how his whole body tensed up, his hands dug into my thighs, his lips pursed, his eyes closed, at the moment of orgasm. I could tell by his face that sex for him was obliterative: his desire terrible, close to a desire for death. My desire was exhausted long ago. I couldn’t say when. I watched, fascinated, wanting to find that kind of obliteration for myself.

With all the time I spent having sex and drinking, I probably could have gotten a job.




I flew on September 11th, and when I got home, my dad had me and my sister come over. He told us he had bladder cancer. He took us through what the doctor said: That they’d start with surgeries to cut it out of his body, and if that didn’t work, they’d consider chemo. And since I was the one without a job, I’d drive him to his hospital appointments.

“I’m going to need you to do this for me,” he said. “Natalie can’t take time off. Your sister can’t take time off.” Natalie was his second wife. She worked at Nordstrom and made most of her money off commission, so she couldn’t take that many sick days. I heard her shuffling around upstairs. She was probably waiting for us to leave because she didn’t want to be seen crying. She had one of those skinny faces that got long and ugly when she cried, like a melting Modigliani.

“Are you listening to me?” My dad asked. “You’re going to take me to the appointments, so I’m going to call you later and give you my dates. You’re going to put them in your calendar.”




A friend was in town for the week visiting his mom. We met up at Le Pain Quotidien to get coffee. I saw him from across the street in the uniform he’d worn since high school: horn-rimmed glasses, a maroon t-shirt, and 501 Levi’s. He’d dropped out of Stanford when we were sophomores and founded a failed tech start-up, but still made it out a few million dollars richer. When his text came through asking if I was home, I decided I felt comfortable seeing him because of his freakish level of success, as though he couldn’t judge me because he wouldn’t be comparing himself anyway. I learned that afternoon that his new company would invest in psychedelic therapy, now that its medicinal use was getting legalized. For the first time in months, I wasn’t bored by conversation or dreading how I would continue to make small talk. I looked up from my latte and asked him if I could have a vial of acid. He told me to stop by his place tomorrow. When I arrived, he had it prepared in a small bottle of mouthwash. He told me I should put two or three drops under my tongue for a proper microdose. I held it in my palms: my golden ticket. Acid was supposed to bring you closer to the divine. Maybe it would bring my own little death, my own obliteration. I vowed to trip until my dad got better, or died.




At twenty-three, I was not naturally inclined to be obsessed with death. But I had read In Search of Lost Time as an undergrad and was sure it prepared me for death’s embrace: it would come in the afternoon, obviously. But when my dad got cancer, I realized I’d been an idiot, and had learned only how to prepare for a fictional death. For the deaths of the characters in the stories I read, or the theoretical deaths of strangers. I never believed that the people I loved would die. I had never given serious thought to their long goodbye and was arrogant enough to never have tried.

Before Naomi and I drove to the ranches to trip, I grabbed my copy of Walden. We parked on the street, took eleven drops each, and followed a horse trail down a nearby hill. We walked between wooden fences that demarcated private property. We pet some foals that walked up to us, even though I’d always been afraid of large animals. In a gap between some overgrown hedges, I found donkeys and we watched them eat hay off the ground. Across from a chicken coop, I walked up to a stone wall covered in bougainvillea and reached my hand out to touch the pink petals. I wondered when, if ever, I would see nature as a sacred shrine, as Thoreau did. If one day I would be able to stand in these desert valleys and behold their awe. I did not doubt that it was there: in sex, in acid, in the wilderness, in plain sight and big as the Sonoran. But it seemed I kept missing my opportunity to recognize life’s eternal embrace. Like maybe I was too busy wiping manure off my shoe to see the great god Pan.

We sat on a fallen tree and I read the introduction to Walden. “The only commodity he cared to earn was leisure: leisure not to be idle, though the world might say so, but to be busy in his own way. ‘If I am not myself, who else will be?’” I read these lines aloud three times. Until each word became a physical object in my mouth. And then I turned to Naomi and said that this was us. And I laughed. I fell off the log and kept reading with the brush caught in my hair. “Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost. One may almost doubt if the wisest man has learned anything of absolute value by living. Practically, the old have no very important advice to give the young, their own experience has been so partial and their lives have been such miserable failures.” I closed the book and frowned.

We sat in silence for a long time. I broke twigs between my fingers while Naomi traced the bark on the log. After a long silence, she told me about how she’d been assaulted over the summer, not that I wanted to know the details. But I felt an obligation to listen. Like maybe if I was able to see her more fully, she would be able to expunge some of her grief. I wanted to do that for her.

“I was staying on campus over the summer doing research for one of my professors. It was long hours in the library, but paid, you know, to hold me over until my job started. And one night, I was drinking with some people at a campus bar, other students and recent graduates who’d stuck around. People I hardly knew, right? This one guy offers to walk me back to my apartment, but then he won’t leave. Or I wasn’t convinced I wanted him to. I don’t know. But I do know he put on a condom, and by the end, it was gone.”

She’d gotten her abortion late last month and applied for medical leave at work, citing unexpected health problems that hindered her mobility, and they’d told her she could work remote indefinitely. Every time I saw her, her bag was full of pads, and it was clear that she, too, was trapped as far down the abyss as I was. That was our shared understanding. Without her, it would have been just me and the kitten. I did my best to ignore my father, except for the days he was penciled in on my calendar: “9 am: drive dad to the hospital.”




Naomi walked into my bedroom while I was on my knees, digging through the underwear and t-shirts strewn across the floor. “Have you cleaned your room since you got here?” she asked, picking up a bra and tossing it in the hamper.

“I know,” I said, not looking up. “I’ll get to it. Have you seen my phone?”

I moved to my bed, lifting the duvet and climbing under. I shuffled like a big orange ghost for a minute before finding my phone under a pillow.

I emerged breathless, smiling. “Got it.” But Naomi wasn’t listening. She had a bundle of laundry between her arms, which she dropped in my hamper. She wore cow-print pants and a blue tank top. Her hair was cornrowed under yellow sunglasses. I looked beyond her, at myself in the mirror, hair matted, wearing a baggy beige top, no bra. Then I looked at my floor, which she’d managed to pick up in less than a minute.

Naomi walked across the room and opened a window.

“Thanks,” I mumbled. And I shook out my duvet in a half-hearted attempt to make the bed. Dandruff and dust flew into the air.

I liked seeing Naomi whenever she could get away from work. She’d come over and I’d take acid. Sometimes we’d do it together. On the weekends, we hiked in the mountains that hugged the city, sitting with the sagebrush for sunset. In the evenings, I drew in coloring books as she knitted, and we watched Attack on Titan. That night, we took just six drops.

In a way, I loved Naomi. We took care of each other. Naomi was my only friend who, like me, had moved back home after college. We’d known each other since high school but fell out for a few years when she hooked up with my boyfriend. It took me a while to forgive her. I was prudish back then and didn’t even sleep with him myself, whereas she wore these tiny dresses that meant everyone had to try not to stare at her breasts in class. I’m pretty sure I told her I couldn’t be friends with a sociopath after inviting her to my house under the pretense that I might forgive her. I think I also called her a cunt across the hallway at school. But I don’t remember all the details. I know that one summer break a mutual friend had a bonfire for her birthday, which ended with the two of us drunk, holding each other and sobbing. We had a shared history long enough to create a complex web of intimacy and could sit together for hours rehashing memories almost ten years old.

We sat on the steps in my backyard and smoked a joint. My mom was inside watching television. She always watched Netflix in the evenings.

“Did you know A Touch of Amour is having a sale on vibrators?”

“But if you got an abortion less than a month ago,” I said.

“I’m still bleeding.”

“You can’t seriously be thinking about sex.”

“I just want to have a plan for when I’m through this.”

“And this is it?”

“I just probably won’t sleep with anyone for a while.”

“I haven’t even masturbated since I got home.”

“I wish I could,” she said, brushing ash off her pants. “Maybe you just need to stop fucking assholes.”

I’d told her how little I related to my friends when they talked about their endless libidos and the pleasure of being touched and having someone inside them. When I’d told her about my college boyfriend, Naomi said she’d probably enjoy having sex multiple times a day, but that I was right to drop him.

“Are you being serious or are you joking?” With her, I couldn’t always tell.

“I’m being partly serious. About all of it,” she said. And then her voice got higher. “I can’t talk to my parents about the abortion because they’re so religious. They don’t believe in sex before marriage. It’s sinful. It doesn’t count. I feel so alone.” She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Her chest expanded, and the backyard light hit her at a harsh angle from above, revealing the bags under her eyes. I saw the divots in her collarbone, and her wrist was skinnier than I remembered. For a moment, I saw her in the aftermath of her assault, shrinking in the darkness of her room, and then at the clinic alone, getting pills from a stranger. I looked away.

“Me too.” This was the only comfort I could offer.

We ordered curry from an Indian spot around the corner and watched Sleepless in Seattle with my mom. After Naomi left, I stepped on a pad on my bedroom floor. I closed my window and crawled under the duvet.




The next night, my dad started bleeding out his catheter and I had to take him to the emergency room. His girlfriend was closing at Nordstrom. I was still tripping, having taken eight drops before leaving my sister’s apartment, but I drove to his condo and picked him up. I put all my energy into watching the road, and when he got in the car, he took my focus for solemnity, when really I carried the burden, the guilt of a child out playing when the trouble happened. I dropped him off at the entrance and went to park the car. When I found a spot on the seventh floor of the parking structure, I ran inside to find him, but he was already being seen by a doctor. They didn’t know how long it would take. No visitors. I walked back to the car and watched Death Note on my phone. I put the driver’s seat all the way back and curled up on my side. After an hour, I checked with the front desk to see if there were any updates. There weren’t. Another hour passed: still nothing. I didn’t know how long it would be until he walked out, and I’d used almost all my cell battery watching tv. I needed my phone in case he called. I hadn’t brought a charger. I walked back to the car with my phone in my pocket, but I still had time to kill.

The structure was quiet. Sometimes a car would drive past, emitting a quiet hum. I hated myself for being high. I hadn’t been ready for him to call, hadn’t even considered he might, even though he’d been operated on last week. The anguish of the other visitors, everyone that had to be at the hospital at eleven p.m., seeped into the car. It pressed against my stomach. And its weight held my father’s distinct anguish: that of an old man teetering on the precipice of his final act. He was furious yet calculated. Like he’d been preparing for this his whole life and knew how to leave everything in order for the women to clean up once he’d gone. It reminded me that my dad had taken care of me in a way I hadn’t taken care of him. He’d built his life from the ground up, and no matter what I did, I wouldn’t be able to appreciate that: how hard it was to be self-made. Over dinner once, when he visited me at college, he got talking about the divorce, and how he’d explained to my mother that he wouldn’t fit in with the WASPs in Providence, because back then, in order to make it in a city like that, everyone who remembers when you’d moved there has to die first. And he started to tear up. I shifted in my seat and tried to act like I knew what he meant, but how could I have any idea? There I was, in New England, attending one of the most expensive private universities in the country, paid for by my mother’s parents. I moved freely in a world that never embraced him.

My mother was different. She was a concerned parent who encouraged me to make of my life what I wanted, as she once did with her painting. She’d received too much of an education in French and the decorative arts as a teenager, her parents preparing her for a life that would become a relic of another era. That’s how I thought of my mother, too: a relic of another era. She listened to Mozart and Chopin on the radio and had tea every afternoon. She ate very little but was always overweight. She gardened in the mornings and drank half a bottle of wine with dinner. At the same time, working with the homeless for a decade, marrying someone her mother hated, unabashedly crying in public, and moving to the west coast, she didn’t think of herself as sophisticated. She thought she had broken from her family.

The crying was the worst part. I walked into the kitchen one day in October and told her I was on my way to take Dad to an appointment. The corners of her mouth dropped, and she sobbed melodramatically. She asked what was going to happen to her if he died. They’d been divorced for more than ten years.

So the sadness felt impassable. But still. My father was a beacon of resilience in my life, until he got sick. Then his resilience became saturnine, and he threatened to kill himself if his quality of life dropped too far. Once both my parents started spiraling, I wasn’t sure what to do anymore. I thought about the acid, and if it really was a change from my life before, or only a gross continuation of my bad habits. If it demonstrated that I was the worst of my parents: my mother, hedonistic, and my father, mirthless.

I was dizzy. I got out of the car and walked to the hood, where no one would see if they drove by. I got to my hands and knees and threw up. I was shaking. I didn’t know why I had puked. Was it the acid? Was it my father’s sadness stuck inside the car? Was it love? Had there simply not been enough oxygen?

I stared at the puddle of puke, which looked like someone had mixed too much water with oatmeal. I saw myself in it, one Thursday evening, home for the last summer before I went to college, when my mother pulled me aside before I went out with friends. I remember my hair was pulled up in a ponytail, and I had on a tank top from Forever 21 and studs for earrings, not the gauge and bar I’d eventually put in.

“I want you to learn self-defense before you leave,” she’d said to me, putting a pamphlet in my hands. “I know you’re going to a small school, but it’s important to be prepared, in case anything happens.”

I put the pamphlet down and tried to walk past her, but she blocked my way.

“I want you to pick a day you can go to a class. It’s just one day. I’ll pay for it.”

She stared me down. So this was serious. I chose the next Saturday’s lesson. And she seemed grateful. She highlighted the date.

“Can I leave now?”

“When I was planning to open my own gallery,” she said, facing the counter, “my biggest backer dropped out because I refused to sleep with him. I never told you father, because he probably would have beat the living hell out of the man. Or killed him. So I stopped working. Until I had kids, I focused on my painting and volunteered. I don’t want the same thing to happen to you and your sister. I don’t want you to grow up in that world.”

It was a strange thing to say to your daughter, I thought. I didn’t know what she expected of me. I turned it into a fight.

“That’s a fucked up story,” I said. And then, because I was so angry, I added, “That’s pathetic.”

She turned around and slapped me. I walked out of the house. Neither of us apologized, but the next morning I told her I’d go to the class. My mother just said “okay.” I tried to pinpoint the difference between us at that moment, but I couldn’t. I saw too much of myself in her exhausted, sagging, hungover body.

And then, back in the parking lot, my phone rang. I wiped my mouth and answered. Within five minutes, I was driving my dad home.




On Monday, I was back at my sister’s apartment. I took thirteen drops and put Nala on a leash and walked her beyond the gate. I wanted to give her the chance to see the world outside. We didn’t go far, just to the bushes and trees in front of the building. Her tail was fluffed up. She walked low to the ground and batted leaves and sticks with her paws. I sat down on the steps, her leash in my hands. I wondered how it was possible that this simple move of twenty feet scared her so much. What she saw in the plants that made them so different from the ones inside the courtyard, and not just more of the same greenery she saw every day. I hoped it meant she appreciated the chance to be out. Maybe, I thought, she’d remember this day forever, looking out the windows at the cardinal flowers, knowing, finally, how they smelled with her nose inside them, her paw pressing into the dirt they were born from. Then I imagined the flowers, shaking in the wind, their red petals falling off each year, their roots caged between pounds of cement, staring back at her as she napped in the window, supplicating, wishing to be as close to the sun as she was, bathing in its heat. Both of them knew how to take advantage of the days. Unlike me, who crawled through my few responsibilities, waiting and wishing for death to finally make a decision, to get it over with.

I hoped that Nala wondered what we were doing here, why I stared with such interest at her sitting in the dirt. Did she like being on display? Did she feel the preservation of the world in wildness? Did she care that the flowers were beautiful, or wonder where they came from? Could she wonder about that—concepts like lineage? She had barely known her parents and had already been fixed. Maybe she sensed that lineage would not play a role in her life. Maybe she lived with no concern for the economy of family, simply waiting out each year, her memory indifferent. Maybe she didn’t care that everyone responsible for her could die. I would never know; I could never ask. Just as I could not know when death would come for my father. Maybe next week. But not now. Not yet. And I felt the shift. My life started to take a defined shape, instead of hiding behind those blurred edges I’d been seeing for months.

“Time to go inside,” I said to Nala, and picked her up.

In January, the doctors said my dad was cancer-free. As was the deal I made with myself, I stopped tripping. Just like that. After drowning for so long in the abyss, I resurfaced. I don’t know which moment held my little obliteration: whether I found it in my puke, or by the flowers, or when my father called to say he would be fine. Maybe it was, all that time, already in all of them.




Naomi was moving to her job in the Bay Area. I drove her to the airport and the whole way we talked about Walden, and how she was about to enter a space Thoreau would have urged her to abandon. But Thoreau had no practical advice to give her, his own experience having been so partial. She understood this. She was off to be a poor, civilized woman, but she would be out from under her parents, as well as her bleeding. And eventually, all the money she would make might buy her freedom. I pulled up to the airport. I took her suitcase out of the trunk.

“I’ll see you in December,” she said.

“Yeah.” And then I hugged her, this girl who had seen me in my most slovenly state, come into my home and still loved me. I didn’t want her to leave. I pulled away. The wind threw her hair into her face, and she pulled it into a bun. She wore her cow pants again, with a black sweater on top. Her skin, even with its acne scars on the cheeks, glowed. I didn’t know how to thank her for the past five months.

“I would have gone with you, you know,” I said. “To the clinic. If you’d asked.”

“I know.” She started to smile, and then put her hand over her mouth, her eyes watering.

“I mean, it’s not like I was busy.”

“Next time,” she said, “I’ll call you.”

And off she went, suitcase trailing behind her, no more pads in her purse. It was as if the past five months had burned in my memory like nothing else before, as if I could at any moment recall our evenings and weekends together and dictate our long and intense conversations, forever preserved by those heightened months after graduation. I could picture the donkeys on the ranches; the bougainvillea growing up the sides of buildings; the kitten greeting me when I opened my sister’s door; the vial of acid we shared, still full to the brim. I knew she wouldn’t call—not anytime soon. Our time together wasn’t exactly easy and it wouldn’t make up for the past, but it was proof that I could stick by someone even when things got tough, and not shove their shortcomings in their face. When I returned home, my mom ran up and held me, her large, sweaty body enveloping mine. I didn’t know I’d been crying. I put my arms around her and started my confession the only way I knew how.

“I hope I didn’t hit anything on the way home.”