5 Happy Stories About Drugs + Alcohol

1 I’m sober because Andy is sober, and because Andy is cool. And because he was sober and cool in front of me.

Once Andy talked for an hour about different planes of existence and different transcendent philosophies, and I wasn’t bored the entire time. Everyone rolled their cigarettes and listened, even the people who usually interrupted with jokes. When Andy finished talking, Erica said “How do you know all that?”

Andy looked at her all “Wise Andy” face, with a half smile — and said “knowing weird things is the only drug I have left.”

2 You can get free caffeine pods from gas stations in Iowa, the ones that cater to truck drivers. They don’t care how many you take, especially the ones in Iowa where I went to liberal arts school. They’re resigned to liberal art school students at that gas station. You should not drink more than two caffeine pods a day, ever, is what it says on the foil that holds the caffeine pods together. I did it anyway, a lot.

One night Noelle and I went to the gas station when I was drunk because I needed Stoks. We went to the gas station so I could get Stoks then finish a paper then finish another paper then finish another paper but before that we went to get Stoks. We sat around in the parking lot of the gas station doing not much of anything which is weird considering how urgent we had felt about everything we had to do on the way there. I don’t remember anything about the rest of that night. I only remember how much fun we had in the parking lot. We laughed so hard I remember wheezing and coughing a little with tears in my eyes, having to breath deep and look at the sidewalk to stop laugh screaming. Before and after we sat in the parking lot I drank a Stok and left the weird foil top thing on the ground. 

3 I’d been having trouble sleeping past 4:30 AM. “Do you want some Xanax?” Anna said when we were talking about insomnia (and isn’t that a marker of intimacy, for some kinds of friendships? A landmark: the first time you talk about insomnia) I said “haha sure, does that even work for sleep though?” The next morning I woke up at 9:04 AM.  When I saw Anna in the library a few hours later I was so relaxed that she said she wasn’t totally sure it was me at first. I remember because she insisted.

“You’re joking,” I said.

“No!” she said. “It’s something about your face.”

“It looks the same.”

“It doesn’t, though.” she said, and then Zoe showed up and I had class and never found out what exactly it was about my face on Xanax that made me look like a different person.

4 The first time I took Adderall I was 28. I had known I might get something out of Adderall for 4 days. I was skeptical — of drugs, of the idea I might have an undiagnosed *issue*, that anything could help me ever with anything. 

The day after I took Adderall for the first time I woke up and looked around my room and saw that the impossible insurmountable dreaded task that I had had to complete was completed, My bedroom, usually disgusting, was clean. I had purchased food for the week. I had taken a shower.  I sat up in my bed and I cried.

There’s no competing with this feeling, I thought while I cried. Nothing. Sex, love, work, emotions, feelings, grief, sleep. How could any of that ever compete?

5. By 9 PM, all of us were drunk and the sun was finally going down and everyone was kind of sweaty and the windows were open and  we still didn’t know each other that well and we had missed each other so much and there was a lot to say and nobody had done anything stupid yet and no one had died yet and someone said “open the windows it’s fucking hot in here” and someone else said “they’re already open!” and we all laughed like that was the funniest inside joke anyone had ever told even though they were just saying a true and very boring fact

6 The problem is I don’t remember any other happy stories.