I move from the wooden chair I’m seated on to the floor.  I sprawl out and groan.  I bury my face next to an empty pizza box.

   

I don’t envy your situation, one of my friends says.

   

You’re an enabler, the other says.

   

I crawl to the corner of the room.  I toss and I turn, and I turn and I toss.

   

The right decision isn’t the easy one, one of them says.  

   

This is withdrawal, the other says.  This is the first stage of withdrawal.  This is necessary.

   

And I isolate.  In a room with friends I manage to isolate myself.  I dive into the depths of my existence.  I exit it all and search and search.  I sit without breathing or moving or seeing or interacting with this world.  I transcend.

   

You’re going to go, aren’t you? one of them asks.

And I return.  I hear his words.  I hold them.  I feel them out.  Then I nod my head.  

I have to.

   

Then you’ve already lost, he says.

And this hurts.  It leaves its mark.  Add it to the scars scattered over my body.  The ones I forget about till I find myself in the bathroom at night with nothing better to do than gawk at my flesh.

   

But we go.  They won’t let me go alone.  We all go.  I arrive with an army of friends.  And there’s a girl I’ve never met before who sits in the kitchen.  She turns wide eyed as I open the storm door, dumbfounded that so many strange men would enter her house this late at night.

   

But I smile at her.  I introduce myself.  I shake her hand.  Her expression never changes.

   

The Mother tells me that her daughter is upstairs.  That She’s waiting for me.

   

Always waiting for me.

   

So I go.  I go by myself and as I near the stairs my heart pumps with greater and greater intensity and the nerves running down my neck contract and pull with each creaky step I weigh on and my head isn’t so easy to move and my breaths get shorter and shorter even though my lungs fight for more and more air and Her door is ajar and I see Her curled on the bed and it seems so inviting but terror swarms over me and I can think of nothing but running back to the car, back to my house, just running and running, and then all my thoughts just race and bounce and explode, but my feet manage to move forward, and then I’m in Her room.

   

Then I’m on Her bed.

   

Then I’m with Her.