By Zach Grossfeld

The first taste of coke numbed Adam's bottom gum like he wished he could numb his heart. The breakup spiral was setting in, but not before he could paralyze the momentum with nostril therapeutics. As he rolled up the twenty dollar bill tighter than a nun's ass crack, Adam twice flicked the sides of the cash cylinder for absolutely no reason. It was just something he'd seen in movies.

How many things do we do just because we saw them in movies? Adam thought. The whole 'do a line, lean your head back, and look up to the sky with hulk mania in your eyes' was the way directors injected coke into the mass psyche. I much prefer to hit it cool and casual, like Johnny Depp in Blow: just a quick toot-ski off a silver spoon while rocking a tuxedo and a woman on my arm who distracts everyone except me.

It didn't occur to Adam that "hitting it like Blow" was also a Hollywood projection.

As he lowered the bill toward the line, he saw some rock still visible.

He grabbed his Chase Sapphire Card from the edge of the table and pressed it down to smear the line flat, listening to the coke pebbles crumble beneath it like a drug prep ASMR.

"Fuck yeah," Adam whispered to himself feeling Johnny-esque as he corralled the coke across the brown dresser. It was a full brown, like a strong dark roast, not that watered-down drip bullshit trafficked to businessmen in the lobbies of Courtyard Marriotts as a perk to corporate slavery.

I have constant anxiety attacks as I spend my life selling software I don't care about, but at least the continental is on the company card! That's how Adam imagined the businessman's rationale.

He swished the flake side to side a few times before finally fashioning two lines. Adam thought about the extra points he could've added to his Chase account if the dealer let him pay by card. Adam was in Chicago at a friend's apartment when he beckoned the dealer with the same app he used back home in New York, which meant the purchase could certainly be categorized under 'travel': two times the points.

As the line lay waiting, he gazed at the off-white, yellow-tinged powder. Adam laughed to himself as he remembered the adage he learned as a boy: 'Don't eat yellow snow.'

What about snorting it and gumming the leftovers, does that count?

He also reminisced about an adage a fellow powder pirate told him in a Lower East Side stall: The pure stuff always has a yellow tint.

God I hope nobody pissed on this.

Adam vacuumed the first line into his right nostril, one of two doors to the soul. They say the eyes are the gateways to the soul, but no one's gaze had ever shown Adam who they really were the way cocaine did. Interesting people on blow became fascinating, and the boring became faster talking, more unbearable versions of themselves, like listening to a podcast about the weather at three times the speed.

He sniffed in the slight burn and then sniffed a second time, feeling the metallic drip begin to numb the back of his throat. The numbing spread almost as fast as the serene euphoria.

Adam's horniness for conversation erupted.

Jake, Adam's friend who lived in the Chicago apartment they were partying in, stood to his right pouring a shot of chilled Tito's. Mikey, another friend of both who lived in Chicago, completed the degenerate trifecta by loading the bong. As his friends fiddled with paraphernalia, Adam yearned to release his coke thoughts in the form of words, but the ideas felt too potent swirling around in his head. It felt like nothing he could say would match the show going on inside his psyche, like the conveyor belt from his brain to the mouth would wipe out 30% of the magic.

Instead, he mentally edged himself with longshot business ideas, like driving directly to Joe Rogan's studio in Austin Texas and telling Rogan why he needed to put his podcast, The Adam Rossi Show, on The Joe Rogan Experience Network. Surely Joe would be blown away by Adam's effort to drive all the way to Austin and be struck by his conversational confidence. Adam pondered flying, but driving shows more guts.

Adam made a note in his iPhone: Rogan Road Trip.

As a podcast host and producer, Adam's drugged-out thoughts typically turned towards podcasting. He had an entire list of 'high ideas' on a notes app that included celebrity partnerships, money, and numbers of people he'd never end up calling. On Adam's last bender, he had spent three hours snorting adderall with a crypto manager who tried to convince him to invest $70k into launching an NFT for his podcast. When Adam woke up the next day and opened his phone, a new contact popped up with the name 'Sam Bankman-Fried: Fuck It ALL IN Pod NFT!!!' Adam laughed to himself and erased the contact immediately.

What a night, I wonder how that guy's crypto platform is doing.

As Adam peered back down at the table, the second line looked like art. He let it rest a bit longer on the dresser top as he admired the way the yellowish, off-white line mingled with the coffee background.

For podcasts, he spent tireless hours choosing the perfect color layouts for Instagram posts to announce new episodes to the world, or rather his compact corner of it, so he appreciated a marriage of pigments that made things pop.

Photoshop was where he honed his eye for the colors, backgrounds, and fonts that combined to form the sixty-second vertical clips that often took him over sixty minutes to create. It was impossible to know how many people actually listened to the podcast as a result of consuming a reel, but nonetheless, he told himself it was necessary to spray six to ten reels per week into the social ether.

Every other creator does it, so it has to work. There's no way that Instagram and TikTok are total soul-sucking scams designed to keep smaller creators coming back like fiends nibbling on a crack pipe of likes, while the bigger companies buy up the spotlight with corporate ad dollars and say the "right" thing.

Adam's content was different.

His had soul.

He could pierce the corporate veil and take over the algorithm organically without a big studio, millions of dollars, or having to stay away from "cancellable" conversational offenses.

He could choose his own guests, run his mouth from time to time, and his audience would grow with him.

My show is different.

I'm different.

Sure, Adam's creativity occasionally rocked back and forth with the currents of the algorithm as he charted a course for the latest trends, but he also stuck to his principles. He made the things that he enjoyed and also aligned with the algorithm.

He wasn't a slave to it.

He really wanted to record that interview with Gigi, a non-binary, Halsey-knockoff singer from Brooklyn who made mediocre-at-best songs and wore her sexuality as her personality.

When Adam asked her what drove her to make music, her response was "I want to end racism. If we stopped spreading hate with our mouths and started spreading love with melodies, like in my new single 'Girl F*ck Power,' George Floyd would still be alive. We should like, defund the Police."

That really spoke to Adam, especially since Gigi relied on police officers to maintain the peace at her massive shows.

Of course, the social justice evangelists on Instagram ate up that clip and vomited heaps of praise upon Adam for having on Gigi.

One tweet from a major media account read, "Gigi is so brave talking about the war on people who don't conform to a single gender. That's the real war, and thank you to The Adam Rossi Show for giving a platform to the important issues."

Adam thought about how veterans who witnessed their friends blown to pieces in Iraq would react when they found out that the real war was actually happening in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Another big music account retweeted the interview with the caption, "Black Lives Matter #GirlF*ckPower."

That actually has a solid ring to it.

The Instagram reels Adam made with Gigi garnered millions more views than any other clip Adam put out, including the clip he released the week before from an episode with musician Mike Banks. A few months back, Adam saw Mike playing on the subway and his voice literally stopped him in the tracks. Adam invited Mike on the podcast and they spoke about how Mike lost everything in Hurricane Katrina and started busking to support his family. It was the episode Adam was most proud of, but it was lost in the algorithmic soup getting only a few hundred views which to Adam meant that the episode wasn't "good." Maybe if Mike changed his name to Non Binary Banks, and stopped talking about unimportant things like "love" or "family" he could make a real run, like Gigi.

Gigi fucking sucks.

I hate her music almost as much as I hate myself.

Fuck her and her trend-chasing trash.

I'm no better.

As he looked back down at the second line of blow, it now looked less like art and more like medicine.

Up the hatch.

The re-boosted euphoria kicked Adam into deeper contemplation as he stared at the Man On The Moon poster adorning Jake's wall, muttering the lyrics of Kid Cudi's 'Up Up And Away.'

I'll be up up and away, up up and away, and in the end they'll judge me anyway, so whatever.

Continuing to hum the chorus, Adam reached for the sliding door of Jake's apartment and opened it as the humid warmth of Chicago July smacked him in the chin. The sun was setting, but a heatwave had injected enough Fahrenheits into the city to summon the night sweats. Closing his eyes and breathing deeply, the blast of hot air felt nice with the blast of drugs. He stood on the balcony, looking out.

He thought about the reason why he started podcasting, to connect with people, which he does and he's good at it, but the conversations themselves make up only ten percent of his time. The other ninety percent is spent staring at audio files, making cuts, editing sequences, and over-analyzing retention analytics to the point of digging his fingertips hard enough into his temples to leave track marks.

Adam's last five episodes have barely cracked the pivotal 'twenty percent watch-time.' Any lower than that laid the graveyard of YouTube.

A couple of years back when Adam was raking in over sixty percent watch time per episode, he joked with a friend that he'd kill himself if he ever dropped below thirty. Now, in his coked-up state of mind, he thought about what he'd have to do to get back into the algorithm's good graces.

I bet I'd pull in ninety percent watch time if I blew my brains out mid-episode. My next guest is a neuroscientist, so I could have fun with it. What if I turned to the neuroscientist twenty minutes into the next episode and said "analyze this brain bitch!" before cocking the pistol to my head and spraying the contents of my mind across my studio? One million views in a day, easy. And the blood splatter across the walls would actually sit well with my orange-tinted hue lights.

"What brain?" said Mikey.

Adam realized he'd whispered his viral suicide tagline out loud. "The brain your Mom gave me last night," retorted Adam.

"I hope she gave you AIDS," spurted Mikey. "And-uhh pass me that bottle."

Adam grabbed the chilled bottle of Tito's on the dresser and poured a shot for himself before handing the bottle to Mikey. He wondered whether Mikey realized that his Mom also has AIDS in the blowjob hypothetical. At the same time, Jake grabbed the bong to repack it for round two.

Adam, Mikey, and Jake were in the midst of an infernally fun chemical rotation that would make Satan blush.

But before we get to the chemicals, you need to know the reason why they're in play. This isn't just any plain old bender.

Yesterday, Adam's girlfriend Sarah, now ex, broke up with him over decadent sushi and now he sought refuge in a decadence of a different kind: drugs.

Less than twenty-four hours ago, Adam flew from JFK to O'Hare to help his girlfriend move into their new River North apartment and sit for a few promising job interviews. After a year of long distance between Chicago and New York, Adam was eager to land a job in the windy city and move in with his girlfriend. They had met thirteen months prior when Adam flew into Chicago for a wedding.

After hooking up that weekend, Adam and Sarah spoke on the phone every night and eventually, they started flying back and forth from Chicago to New York every few weeks. Adam told himself that he would never start a relationship long distance, but against his better instincts they made things official. Both two years out of college, Adam and Sarah were living with their respective parents to save money for their first apartment.

They had agreed that since Sarah wanted to be close to her Mom (Adam was indifferent about the distance from his parents), Adam would make the move to Chicago. And, since he would need a new job to pair with the move, he lined up three promising accounting positions that, according to LinkedIn, aligned best with his exaggerated resumé. While crafting his CV a few months back, Adam thought about how a brutally honest version of his resumé would read:

Work Experience:

KPMG - Staff Accountant (May 2015 - June 2017, New York): Manages financial reports, records, and accounts. Maintains knowledge of acceptable accounting practices and procedures. Wonders why managers who make three times more than him do one-third of the work, and spend 40 hours per week on the golf course closing deals that would have closed anyway. Typing in "riding POV "to PornHub, turning the volume all the way down, and stroking himself in near-silence in the bathroom stall on lunch break. Saving up his adderall prescription to snort on the weekends as he drinks vodka sodas to the point of temporary mental retardation and eventually, shitty sleep. Staving off Sunday afternoon panic attacks by smoking weed. Realizing that his usual escape from anxiety is starting to cause even more panic. Making false promises to himself that he wouldn't end up as unhappy as his managers who fuck their wives twice a month. Fake listening to his girlfriend on Facetime during work breaks. Fake listening on conference calls while mouthing "Fuck, Fuck, fuck, fuckk, fuckkkkk" into the speaker. Actually listening to his own thoughts during a momentary break in his miserable office existence, then scrolling through anything to make them stop. Fuck.

Education:

University of Rhode Island- Student Athlete (September 2011 - May 2015): Lifting weights, throwing baseballs, and attending practice. Walking into classrooms and zoning out to the point of near-comatose. Purchasing old exams that professors paid $250k per year couldn't be bothered to update. Hanging out with teammates in dorms, packing dips, drinking natty lights, and, in those moments, feeling the soul sucked out of him by school flow back into his body. Banking his entire self-worth on becoming a professional baseball player. Topping out at 94 mph as a lefty his sophomore year. Getting letters of interest from half of the teams in the MLB, including Adam's hometown New York Mets. Ditching his freshman, fratified Vineyard Vines wardrobe and scavenging the local Nordstrom Rack for something more him: fitted dark tees, discount rack Rag & Bone Jeans, and black combat boots. Reading 'The Game' by Neal Strauss and feeling empowered by sexual validation from females. Forgetting about condoms. Finding his first girlfriend. Cheating on her. Swearing off relationships for the rest of college as he built up his "body count." Listening to an audiobook on eating pussy. Listening to an audiobook on investing in stocks. Feeling a sharp stabbing sensation in his elbow every time he threw the ball. Getting an ulnar nerve surgery. Starting the rehab process with high hopes of climbing back to 94 mph. Feeling the stabbing sensation come back. Getting another ulnar nerve surgery. Topping out at 85 mph after 18 months of rehab. Feeling his dreams of becoming a major league baseball player slip away. Going into denial. Retreating into the only things that gave him comfort outside of baseball: friends, liquor, and fucking. Realizing that he spent the first 22 years of his life specializing in a sport at which he now sucked. Fuck.

In the midst of Adam's post-baseball downward spiral, he met Sarah and she made him feel like everything was okay. Even though he was rotting in a cubicle instead of chasing his MLB dreams, Sarah didn't care. And even though Adam couldn't see it himself at the time, to her, he was worth more than a washed-up pitcher.

Then fast forward a year.

Just two hours after Adam landed in Chicago ready for the next step in his life with Sarah, she ended things over sushi.

And that's where the chemicals come in: breakup medicine.

Adam had plans for the whole weekend to go on interviews and hang out with Sarah and her Mom, and obviously, that was not happening after the sushi breakup. So, Adam called up two of his best degenerate teammates from college he knew he could count on for emergency debauchery, and who also happen to live in Chicago.

After a couple of quick calls to friends, a quick message to the dealer, and Adam had all the things he needed to shelve his heartbreak until the Sunday afternoon flight back to New York.

The debased drug rotation went as follows:

Step 1) Snort a line (or two) of mediocre Chicago cocaine.

Step 2) Clear the bong full of surprisingly exceptional Chicago bud.

Step 3) With the smoke still in your lungs, rip a chilled shot of refreshing Tito's vodka.

Step 4) Once the shot is down, exhale the smoke

This ungodly sequence of insobriety made of weed, coke, and vodka was something that Mikey had coined 'Mary Jane Blows Tito.'

Having completed round one, Adam repeated the same Chase Sapphire coke prep sequence for the second.

"I'll see you boys in hell," Adam said with a smirk as he sniffed himself further into the abyss.

The drug trinity fused in Adam's bloodstream to form a concoction that could put Ozzy Osbourne in rehab. If opioids caused a crisis, this would kickstart the fucking apocalypse.

The sharpness of the coke balanced out the heaviness of the bud, and the alcohol staved off any anxiety spike from both.

The feeling took him.

If I could disappear right now, Adam thought, I'd bring this golden ratio of drugs to the Himalayas, become one with the monks, and pray daily at the altar of the perfect dose.

Why did monks spend decades attempting to reach nirvana when an immediate answer lay at the bottom of a bag, a bottle, and a bong? I'd tap one of my newfound monk brothers on the shoulder, place the drugs in front of him, watch him snort and sniff everything in sight and see his eyes fill with light as he met God. As the other monks became curious, we would all imbibe together and have the kinds of conversations that I could only dream of recording. We'd bare each others' souls on the summit temple with zero insecurities, reaching a speechless, parallel state where electricity and love would flow saying things no words ever could.

Then, at 8 pm every night, the hour a monk normally rests his eyelids, the late legend Avicii would descend from the heavens and play equally electric sets for us, the brotherhood. Levels, Wake Me Up, and Waiting For Love would ricochet across the stone temple walls as we danced in the way we wished their souls could dance during meditation. Purple and blue neon lights would fractal in all directions, transforming the monastery into a mountaintop Tomorrowland. The legs of monks adorned in orange robes would shuffle EDM style in Coachellan patterns as Goddess women of all ethnicities made their way onto the dance floor. Dark-skinned, light-skinned, fat-assed, petite-cheeked, perky-titted, and double d'd beauties would gyrate in harmony as the lips, hands, breasts, groins, and asses of monks and goddesses melded as one.

As I grind with my Goddess, I'd look across and catch eyes with one of my brothers doing the same. "I'll see you in hell," we'd mouth to each other as our drugs, bodies, minds, and melodies merged like a symphony orchestra. Then, at peak crescendo, a simultaneous soul-shattering orgasm would rock everyone into submission as pleasure erupted from the temple.

Soaked floors, shaking legs, and then, the deepest of sleeps.

Morning and night, we'd practice a type of spirituality known well by our ancestors that's been demonized by modern "experts": Drug-assisted serenity.

In recent years, psychedelics have seen a renaissance in cultural acceptance, but why not the "bad" drugs too? Cocaine, alcohol, and ecstasy have all been deemed too "unclean" to coincide with a spiritual experience. What if it's not the drugs? What if it's the way we approach the drugs that unlocks the spiritual connection?

Take an ayahuasca ceremony and everything involved with it: the drums, the chanting, the groups of people in nature, the intention of healing, the therapeutic conversations surrounding trauma. Take all of that, but replace ayahuasca with 100% pure Columbian coke in exactly the right dosage. Are you telling me that doing bumps of flake off of handcrafted wooden spoons deep in the Amazonian rain forest, chanting, surrounded by people you love wouldn't induce a spiritual state? Make you feel closer to God? That IS God.

Renowned neuroscientist and drug researcher Dr. Carl Hart says, “I discovered that the predominant effects produced by the drugs [discussed in this book] are positive. It didn’t matter whether the drug in question was cannabis, cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, or psilocybin."

When you look into my eyes on the mountaintop with the golden ratio and Tim Bergling scorching through my veins, you will see the soul of a man peeling back the fabric of the universe.

"You good dude?"

A voice drifted into Adam's monastic fantasy.

"You good?" said Mikey. "You were staring into space and uhh like clenching your jaw for five minutes straight."

"Monks," said Adam.

"Monks?"

"Monks."

"Fuck yeah," said Mikey, "let's uhh rip another line, to Monks!"

As the monasterial mirage faded into oblivion, Adam reproduced his Sapphire preferred card.

########

"There are millions of people out there," said Sarah, as the first orb of a tear formed in her right eye.

Entranced by the trays of sushi, Adam didn't realize that his girlfriend had commenced the breakup process.

"There are so many people out there," she went on, tears now cascading "and we've only been together for a year, long distance, like what are we doing?"

Sarah wiped the snotty salt mixture from her nose as Adam nodded unconsciously in response to her existential fears.

He had never been broken up with before, at least not in the formal way. Adam's sophomore year in college, he fucked a random soccer girl just two weeks into his relationship with his first girlfriend. Feeling guilty and filled with the naïveté of an 18-year-old, Adam marched up to his girlfriend's dorm room to tell her what happened half-expecting everything to be okay.

I fucked up.

I'm sorry.

Tell me what I need to do to gain your trust again.

And just like that it was over, sort of. He and his ex fucked on and off throughout college and things just faded away slowly until graduation. There was no definitive ending point, just a sun setting slowly until Adam looked around one day and realized it was dark.

He felt more nostalgia than pain.

"I-uh, I don't know if I want this anymore," wept Sarah.

"Mmhmm," Adam nodded again, still under the sushi's spell.

The glossy, pinkish-red finish of the salmon avocado roll was begging to be defiled.

He stared.

It was like a small sac of sea butter nestled against its equally meltable avocado companion. The rice hugged the two together like a good Mom: gentle enough to feel you can let go, but firm enough to feel you don't have to.

Adam squeezed his chopsticks around the rice layer, crisscrossing them like an American, and dipped the piece into his soy sauce-wasabi mixture. He always put too much wasabi in the soy sauce because he loved the sinus-clearing explosion that detonated his nostrils: a cleanse by pain.

Feeling the sushi melt on his tongue was the most presence he'd felt in months.

"There's jus-," Sarah wiped her tears away and squeezed Adam's hand under the table, "There's just something missing, I- I don't know."

The squeeze triggered Adam's attention back to his girlfriend.

Sarah had taken Adam's attention towards the sushi as some sort of psychological defense mechanism against the reality of the breakup. Like it was too much for him to handle in the moment, so he took refuge in the rolls. Maybe the presence was a shield, his brain's way of protecting him, colluding with his palate to draw attention away from the pain and into the pickled ginger.

The truth was it was a defense mechanism, but also, it had been almost twenty-four hours since Adam last ate.

A month ago, he hopped on the latest fitness fad and started intermittent fasting. Normally, he skips breakfast, waiting about 16 hours between the last bite of dinner and the first meal around 12pm the next day. The day of the breakup, Adam decided to attempt his first day-long fast. With the flight to Chicago and an off-day from working out, this twenty-four-hour period presented the perfect opportunity to test his appetite.

For those of you who have never tried intermittent fasting, here's a taste of what the first few weeks feel like. You wake up hungry because you've eaten breakfast every day for the first 25 years of your life. You drink a hot drink in the morning, matcha tea or coffee because the fasting forums tell you that filling your stomach with scalding liquids expands the gut to make you feel more full.

Then, you feel good for about an hour, great actually. Until the pangs strike. At 10 am, your eyes glue to the clock counting the milliseconds until the breaking of the fast at noon. You work, barely, and the rumbles get louder and stronger no matter how much coffee you slop down your throat. You're hit with anxiety waves of over-caffeination and stabs of hunger as the voice in your head talks shit to you.

Wait til noon you Cinnamon Toast Crunch craving pussy! C'mon, you're gonna scarf down a bowl of cereal in the office kitchen now? At 11:33? So close to the finish line. Less than thirty minutes and you can open your sad lunch bag and pop your pathetic peanut butter sandwich to ease the dread of staring at vapid, office walls as your soul slips away. Cheers cunt!

So, when the starter plates of edamame and gyoza hit the table that breakup evening, every primal hunger switch in Adam's brain being drowned out the past 24 hours flipped on diabolically. He attacked the appetizers, then the sushi, pausing only briefly to wait for the scorching of the wasabi to pass. Carnage in the form of edamame shells and stray rice littered the table. The moment Sarah's hand touched Adam's, it was like a younger cub pawing the King Lion while in the middle of devouring a fresh gazelle carcass.

This better be important.

When he finally looked up to see the tears in her eyes, Adam awoke from his ravenous daze.

"Are you gonna say anything?" said Sarah, eyes now waterlogged.

The heat pooled in Adam's cheeks.

His gut clenched.

He had barely paid attention to Sarah's words, but he could see what was happening in her face.

The weight of heartbreak pressed into Adam like a hundred-pound dumbbell resting on his chest. He stroked Sarah's hand and squeezed her fingertips like he started to do on their third date. It was a weird thing to do, and Adam didn't know why he did it, somewhere between fixation and fetish, but it made him feel safe. When the weight of the world pressed down on him, he could squeeze her fingertips and feel like he had a fighting chance.

Tears formed in Adam's eyes. Any hunger he had felt was now replaced with a pit that would take years of emotional fasting to digest.

He squeezed.

As he looked into her eyes, he pretended for a moment that everything was normal again. He looked into her eyes like he did on the beach during sunset or when he rested inside her after sex, secured to each others' souls.

He squeezed.

When the moment faded, the pit returned.

"Excuse me, my love, I need to take a massive shit."

As Sarah's tears flowed, Adam wiped the evidence from his face.

He calmly stood up and made his way to the restroom as he pondered the unfairness of the current predicament.

No one talks about this, but it deserves to be talked about. The person being broken up with, the breakee if you will, is almost always caught off guard. The breakup is delivered to the breakee like a knockout punch combination set up by weeks, possibly months of preparation by the breaker, the one doing the breaking up. The breaker realizes the relationship is over long before she makes her feelings known to her partner. She has dozens of conversations with herself and her friends, running through all different types of scenarios of what would happen during the actual breakup. The breaker trains, in a way, like a UFC fighter enduring a fight camp. The breaker works out how they're going to deliver the blow, counter-responses from the breakee, and slip any notion of a future together. From the moment she felt that first flick of "I don't want this anymore," the camp had commenced.

All the while, the breakee is flung into the octagon on a moment’s notice.

No time.

No prep.

Just a hail of emotions, words, and finally, submission.

While in the bathroom, Adam wiped any lingering signs of heartbreak from his face, took a few deep breaths, then returned to the table. Sarah was in full meltdown.

He signaled to the waiter for the check.

"It's been a pleasure," nodded the waiter as he placed the bill pretending that nothing was out of sorts, that the girl across from him wasn't bawling, and that Adam wasn't a monster for not comforting her.

"Thanks."

As he ushered Sarah towards the elevator, a glisten of salmon from the table caught Adam's eye as he looked back at the unfinished feast. He wondered if there was any way he could ask the waiter to box up the sushi without seeming like a total piece of shit.

What would send Adam sooner to hell? Making his crying girlfriend, now ex, wait a few minutes for to-go sushi? Divine sushi nonetheless. Or letting the master chef's creations go to waste on the whim of an emotional torment that happens thousands of times per day around the globe? Adam was sure he'd have his heart broken again. But you only taste the best sushi you've ever had once.

"Can I get a box for this please?" Adam said to the waiter.

"Excuse me sir?" the waiter said in disbelief. "Do you really think that's-uh wise?"

Adam walked up to the waiter with fierce deliberation and a three-inch advantage.

"Wise?? That girl over there of just mortal kombatted my fucking heart out. She's dead to me, just like the fish on the table you'll put in my box. The only difference is I'm gonna face fuck that fish tonight just like she was probably getting face fucked when I was in New York. Now be a good little boy and fetch me my food, okay pumpkin?"

The waiter swallowed nervously and came back with a box.

Sarah gathered herself as best she could as Adam shoveled scattered pieces into the styrofoam.

When they walked out of the restaurant, the air was ice. The heat of July had vanished but somehow Adam didn't feel cold in his short sleeve button down, just empty.

It started to snow.

He looked at Sarah, still crying in her sundress, as snowflakes peppered her olive shoulders.

The emptiness in Adam's soul filled with the rage he'd been suppressing during dinner.

"Don't ever fucking call me again. No text, no DM, no call, no fucking nothing."

Sarah was now back in full-blown meltdown, half crying, half hyperventilating, but still looking at Adam like he was the man she loved, because she did. She had ended it and knew it was over, but of course, she still felt love for him.

"I-I fly to Chicago ready to leave behind my friends, my family, th-the place I grew up for this relationship," Adam yelled. "I have interviews lined up ready to get a new fucking job, and you wait until..until the night before my first interview to tell me there's a lot of people out there?? ARE YOUU FUCKINGGG KIDDING ME?? How long were you feeling like this?? I mean..."

The snow was now pouring.

"Are you ff- You loved me like a kid loves a fucking shiny toy. Yup, That's it! I'm bored! On to the next hot wheels or whatever the fuck..Do you think I don't know how many people are out there? That I don't think about my alternate lives and what they could be like? Not only are there so many people out there, there are so many universes out there, and in each one I'm a different person doing different things, fucking different people trying to find some semblance of feeling okay in this life. There's a lot of people, OF COURSE THERE'S A LOT OF PEOPLE, THAT'S THE POINT!! THAT'S WHAT LOVE IS. THERE ARE SO MANY FUCKING PEOPLE AND I CHOSE YOU!"

The snow piled three feet high encircling them both to the waist on the sidewalk, but Adam felt not even a tinge of chill. Passerbys strolled through the powder in skirts, flip flops, and t-shirts on the way to the beach on Lake Michigan.

"Did something happen in Chicago? I-Is there something you're not telling me?? I mean, you gave me this shit sorry excuse for a breakup, did something happen?"

Sarah looked down at the ground, her tears now golden orbs blazing through the snow.

"Answer me! Did you fuck someone?"

Sarah said nothing, and she didn't have to.

Adam then laughed the kind of laugh a police interrogator emits when he's getting nowhere, then spit through the snow.

It was bloody.

"Last week I was in The Flying Cock," said Adam, "and this girl sat next to me at the bar. We talked for a bit before she invited me into the bathroom. Her friends were gonna leave soon and she said she had to go with them, but she told me she wanted to have some fun before she left. And you know what? I didn't entertain it for a second, but now I wish I did. I wish I bent her ass over the filthy tile and pounded her brains out as her head thrust in and out of range of the electric dryer. I'd've fucked her so hard for so long that the people in line outside the bathroom would've thought an entire army was drying their hands. I wonder if I'll see her back there next weekend."

Adam wiped away a golden tear and stroked Sarah's cheek.

"You know, I know you fucked up. I know you did. No one breaks up on a whim after a year on some half-assed excuse like that. And you know, the worst part isn't even that you cheated on me and can't admit it. It's that your excuse is SO FUCKING BORINGG. I mean come on! You're a smart girl. Use that whore brain and work out something more exciting. Tell me you fell in love with my brother or you're a lesbian or you got selected to go on a Mars mission and need to leave Earth."

Adam stared at the sky and then back at his problem.

"But no, you went with there's a lot of people. Surveyyyyy Sayyyyyssss: NO SHIT! Give me 'Breakup Lines' for 600 Alex. This breakup line is the most uncreative untruth ever uttered by a two-faced slut. What is 'There's a lot of people?' Ding Ding Dingg! Tell the bitch what she's won!"

Adam unzipped his fly, smirking at Sarah.

"I flew out here for you. I lined up job interviews for you. I was willing to give up my family and friends in New York, FOR YOU! And you pulled the rug out, just like that without any consideration for the sacrifices I made for us."

Adam laughed, then regained his momentum.

"Why don't you suck my dick on this sidewalk so I at least get something out of this weekend."

Sarah wiped the tears from her face and knelt down into the snowfall. As her knees sank into the powder, the snow she touched turned to black sheets. Adam recognized the sheets as his, and they were now laying in his bed atop the snowfall. The city disappeared.

Only the two of them remained positioned on Adam's bed on an endless blanket of powder matching the sky.

Sarah edged her knees closer to Adam who was now sitting with his legs spread on the bed, and slowly cupped his balls.

Her hands were warm.

It felt nice.

Adam was starting to regret what he said.

"I'm sorry I hurt you," she said looking into his eyes.

"Shut up," said Adam, a tear now forming in his eye.

"I never wanted to hurt you."

She leaned in as her lips made first contact with Adam's cock.

He closed his eyes as the rush of pleasure and warmth expanded inside Adam like he just swallowed a grenade of gratification.

When they opened, the snow was receding. Adam looked down to try to see Sarah but his vision tunneled and her form blurred. The blur intensified and a blackness started to close in. The snowy scene dissipated as Adam tried with every ounce of his soul to focus on the last fleck of Sarah's face. He could make out her lips and eyes. Adam blinked hard in an attempt to reset his vision, but when he lifted his lids again, she was gone. Instead, he saw a wall with a familiar Kid Cudi poster.

He was back in Jake's apartment.

#######

His face and body were numb, but Adam had enough feeling to know that he was lying on his back and felt a vague throbbing on the side of his head.

His breathing was school bus slow.

He felt a weight on his thigh and turned his head towards the source. The simple act of turning his neck felt like someone had tied a resistance band around his skull and was pulling in the opposite direction.

Reality was heavy.

As he fought to align his tunnel vision with the origin of the weight, Adam saw a leg wrapped in dark jeans, then muscled his neck further to see that the leg sprouted from a blue button-down adorned torso.

It was Mikey.

He tried to shake Mikey's leg to get his attention but could barely muster the strength to fire his hips. Eventually, Adam got his leg to slide off but Mikey said nothing. The leg lay limp.

"Mii- Mii-uuhke- Miiuuhhkeeyy," whimpered Adam. His voice had the oomph of a ninety-five-year-old smoker.

No response.

Adam's vision focused on Mikey's denim as the dark blue frays of a ripped patch faded to brown whisps. The whisps turned to hair as a blurry, familiar beauty came into view.

It was Sarah.

She was lying on top of Adam and he could feel the pressure of her body on his.

It was the best feeling.

Sarah leaned in and kissed him with enough passion to fill two lifetimes: Love concentrate.

Then, she slapped Adam across the right cheek.

"That's for saying I have a whore brain," said Sarah. She gently kissed the spot where her hand made contact, "and...I love you, you little bitch."

Adam smiled, gazing into her eyes as best he could with everything looking like a hazy pixelation.

"I meant it as a compliment," said Adam, " and I love you too, you little bitch."

As Adam leaned up to kiss Sarah, the warmth of her lips faded back to numbness, but it was stronger this time.

Adam tried to lift himself up but could barely will his shoulders off the ground, the type of movement that Adam's Dad considered a "sit-up." Adam muscled his head, this time the other way, and saw Jake's face turned towards his.

Jake's face filled up the waning tunnel of Adam's vision as the darkness crept closer and closer to total blackout. Jake was horizontal, and his lips were moving like a tired fish, opening and closing in the hopes of words. Adam tried to speak, but the only sound he could muster was a feeble groan.

For a moment, Adam's vision went completely black to the point where he wasn't sure if his eyes were open or closed. The blackness transformed into the shimmer of the bed sheets as the expanse of snow returned.

Sarah's face was clear this time.

"I didn't mean to hurt you," she said, "I just didn't know what to say."

"It's oka-"

"No, it's not," said Sarah. "I was gonna wait until after your interviews to tell you how I felt, but when I was with you in the restaurant I just broke down."

"It's okay, I know," said Adam. "What a fucking ride."

Sarah laughed as her tears reformed. Adam reached up to wipe her eyes and cupped his hand around her cheek. And then, like a dying star imploding on itself, the warmth of Sarah's being collapsed back into Adam's cold, anesthetized condition on the apartment floor.

Adam felt the floor on his back, and again, the bleariest tunnel of tunnels emerged for him to see through. His peripherals blackened to the point where the entire world diminished to a dime-sized hole of light.

Adam shivered.

The effort required to take one breath felt like sucking in through a straw.

Right before his hole of vision closed completely, Adam darted his eyes to catch a glimpse of a football on Jake's shelf. They used to throw it around when Jake lived in New York, and now they tossed it in Millenium Park after a few amber lagers when Adam came to visit.

As the light bounced off the leather barely registered in his retinas, Adam remembered an article in the New York Post he read a few weeks ago about a group of football players partying on a break from school. It was titled 'Six West Point Spring Breakers Overdose On Fentanyl Laced Cocaine.'

Adam recalled the uneasy feeling he had after reading the story. He had only done cocaine on half a dozen occasions or so, but recently, a rash of articles was raising alarm that fentanyl had infected the supply. Adam scavenged the r/cocaine forum on Reddit, trying to figure out what the chances were of actually purchasing tainted blow. The surfing eased his anxieties about future 6 am evenings.

"The fentanyl myth is complete fear-mongering by the anti-drug crowd," wrote foodyfiend79, "Thousands of people in NYC alone blow down on weekends without any problems."

"Stop buying stepped-on shit and you'll be good," wrote cokecasablanca.

"Buy the fentanyl testing kit," wrote rickshaw989, "It's a no-brainer. The cost is twenty bucks and the benefit could be your life."

"Yeah, the testing kits aren't even accurate," replied diabolique77, "I tested a batch this week that came up positive for fentanyl, and I used a g from the same batch last weekend. If the test was correct, I'd be dead."

Three out of four is good enough for me, thought Adam. And I bet most of the people who died had some other crazy shit in their system.

He went into his Amazon shopping cart and deleted the fentanyl testing kit he'd thought about purchasing for the summer.

Now, less than a month later, he lay on the floor of his friend's apartment wondering if this was how people end up in a tweet by The New York Post. Was it fentanyl flooding his veins? Was it the breakup? How many retweets would he get?

Adam didn't know, and he didn't care.

Whatever this was, it started not to feel so bad.

The straw-sucking sensation ceased.

His whole life he had been burdened with the business of breathing, and now he felt that he could let every ounce of air go without care of replenishing the supply. It's hard work to fill up oxygen bags every three to five seconds, and for the first time, Adam felt truly still.

The dime-sized hole of light was now a pin-sized hole approaching abyss.

He closed his eyes and watched the last glint of light dance across his lids.

Adam heard Sam Harris once say during a guided meditation to "stare into the darkness of your eyelids like you would a sunset."

He did.

It was beautiful.