On the drive to Adam’s apartment we discuss the proper protocol for drug deals after posing the philosophical question:

What should you do if your drug dealer doesn’t text you back?

Should I text him again? Does the three-day rule apply in this situation?

We drive past the gas station and u-turn on a one-way street.
In front of the 7-11 we stand dumbly when the doors do not open
automatically for us. Amazed that there is something outside of us
that will not let us in.

Outside of his apartment the neighborhood cat sleeps under a car.

I bend down to look at the sleeping cat. I watch her suffer from the constraints of being a soft, fuzzy, hand-sized thing.

I know that she does not want to be touched.

I used to grab at her and she would run to pick at dead things at the far end of the parking lot.

She is happier there, with the dead things, than she would be underneath my needy palm.

At 7-11 we bought toothbrushes and orange juice and now, in the dark of Adam’s room, I watch him brush his teeth.

“Did you smoke today?” I ask.

“Yes. But it’s your fault. You weren’t around to distract me with better vices.”

We made a deal that day:

Every time he wanted to smoke a cigarette, we would have sex instead.

I am tired.

That night, when I am naked and he is clothed, his eyes become scared and hungry.

He turns to me and says, “You make me believe in God and holidays, if God and holidays are abstractions for intense longing.”

Tenderly rubbing over my thighs and my back, he tells me that he just doesn’t know what to do with me, like I am a problem to be endured or dealt with.

I turn to lay on my back, eyes flirting furiously with the ceiling tiles.

I am quiet.

Still curved towards me, he tells me about how he would like to have a child with me so that it could be beautiful.

“Love, love, love,” he hums. He is singing the words to a song that I do not know.

He remembers the episode of The Conan O’Brien Show where Conan O’Brien becomes an ordained minister for free online so that night the two of us become ordained ministers for free through an online Universalist Unitarian church.

With our newfound powers, we marry the tables to the chairs and the bedside lamp to the nightstand using The Naked Lunch as a bible stand-in.

Tonight everything has joined in union, arbitrarily. The bedside lamp did not protest to its new life on the nightstand. I feel happy but not in love. But I don’t feel sad so, as a wife, I sleep well.