The familiar warmth starts to flood my limbs, and a tingling sensation spreads around my lower belly. The chemicals drift in the vastness of my veins, a livestream of blood flowing and carrying the hope of a better future. Eyes shut, eyes dry, mouth agape and ready to be filled with heavenly carbon dioxide, my muscles softly loosen into tender emptiness.

Swallowed by the warm embrace of mucus dissolving powder-white, I lose my strength to fight. My mind finally accepts my body’s decay, and every cell allows exhaustion to crush its internal structure. A collapse so massive that its only counterbalance can be a sudden burst of maniac happiness.

Mind and body soften toward ground level, leveling themselves into total equilibrium. I am an idiot for believing; I am utterly, incomprehensibly stupid for praying, as only this body can ever soften so much.

Adrift in myself, I think of Need for Speed, or maybe any other racing game. The molecules regroup in the hope of winning the race and dominating the receptors in my brain. Rather slowly typing and drooling, though—like a sympathetic shift—which reminds me that masturbating must be bourgeois.

Someone find me. I think I might be in the swamp, or in the clouds. Either way, the texture is the same. Ninety- nine percent of me is a shell; one percent is prayers, and they scare the shit out of me.

But I have found methods to set camp here and now, even though the terrain is rather dull and kind of dead.

The warmth makes me expand, grow, and reach for the hidden ones—the ones beyond my walls and skin.

It’s only then, and not before—really not before—that my touch finds friendship.