Tom Busillo
It Wasn't Necessarily the Cocaine
It wasn’t necessarily the cocaine that made me decide to propose.
But it didn’t hurt.
We were at a dinner party hosted by a guy named Craig, who collected vintage spoons and rugs, all laid haphazardly over each other like modular wall-to-wall carpet. There was a duck confit situation. A woman in a tinfoil dress read aloud from her own screenplay. Someone played harp through a loop pedal.
I had done two bumps in the guest bathroom – polite ones, just enough to sharpen the evening\ – and then I looked at her across the room and thought: Yes. This is the moment. This is the woman. This is the jagged point in time where all my timelines converge like a trainwreck inside a fireworks factory.
I didn’t have a ring, so I bent one of Craig’s cheap knives and got down on one knee, and she looked at me like I had just asked her to join a pyramid scheme involving endangered birds.
“You’re bleeding,” she said.
I hadn’t noticed. My nose. My fingers. The knife. Who could say.
“Yes,” I said. “But I’m doing it with love.”
She didn’t say yes. But she didn’t say no. She said, “Maybe go sit down.”
So I did.
The harpist started playing something that sounded like a whale giving birth to triplets.
Someone handed me a napkin. Someone else handed me a tangerine.
Craig leaned over and whispered, “That rug was Peruvian.”
I apologized – to Craig, to the rug, to the tangerine, to time itself.
She never mentioned it again.
We dated another year. She left me for someone who made their own vinegar.
But sometimes, when I see a knife or pass in front of a rug store that has been having a going out of business sale for six years, I still think: It wasn’t necessarily the cocaine. But it definitely helped me believe in forever for a second.
Tom Busillo's (he/his) writing has appeared or is forthcoming in McSweeney's, trampset, The Disappointed Housewife, Heavy Feather Review, and elsewhere. He is a Best Short Fictions nominee and the author of the unpublishable 2,646-word conceptual poem "Lists Poem," composed of 11,111 nested 10-item lists. He lives in Philadelphia, PA.
