Four years ago I thought heartbreak was unreciprocated crushes and a B- minus in biology.

Today I clumsily dressed myself to the news of a friend downing bottles of Percocets, Demerols, and some little red ones, the ones which always stained her tongue because they were hard to swallow and she always let them sit too long. We would stick out our tongues at each other and sleepily laugh it off after the opiates would start to fade and we'd have coffee and cigarettes for as long as we could keep our heads up. She downed the whole damn ordeal with a bottle of gin, and I could almost see her, propped up on her elbows, stomach flat against the bed, swirling her feet in the air, delicately lining up which she would take when and how many she would take at once, swigging in between doses until she'd be too weak to count anymore, grabbing for scattered handfuls of capsules and chalky wet tablets to shove into her mouth when she could pry the bottle away from it. I bet she was clutching that thing like a child when her eyes were rolling into the back of her head and she was spitting up speckled red saliva onto all her designer clothing heaped in piles around the floor.