*＊✿❀ ☁️ SUMMER KETAMINE RITUAL 🍒 ❀✿＊*

Abby Romine

Over summer, I do ketamine 6 times in one week with an 80 year old anesthesiologist. He says we’re fixing my hard drive. Pills are for software issues. Ketamine loves estrogen, he emphasizes. His sloth-covered office. A pretty girl like you, he says, should feel like a Disney Princess. I laugh, never showing my teeth.

The ritual goes as follows,

1.  Eat a bowl of oatmeal. Drink a small yellow Gatorade. Arrive.

2.  Public restrooms circle Hell. Pee in Hell.

a. Avoid pissing your pants in Not Hell.

3.  Enter a cold room. Accept a white blanket. Use the same vein. Turn off the lights.

4.  Take a flash photo. Send it to your mother.

5.  Feel close to God for an hour. Understand. It’s all so simple. Simple, but still.

a. Bailey tells me sex on ketamine is supposed to be really intense. He knows exes that fell back in love after it. I tell him, that makes sense. On ketamine I’m in love with everyone.

6.  Drink water from a paper cup. Walk back to the restroom. Pee. Still coming down. Take a flash photo in the mirror. Attach yourself to reality. Send it to your mother.

7.  Depart.

a. Go shopping. See a bunny. Name it Context.

b. Get lost. Go home.

8.  In bed. Pour over hundreds of screenshots.

a. Laugh. Then cry. And sleep.

b. Wake up wanting.

According to an arbitrary rating system after each session, I am 11% better. I clap a gnat to death. A big boom for a minuscule thing. The acupuncturist loses a needle in me. The Uber has fake grass for a floor. He wishes me good luck in all my beginnings. But it’s my ends that need the wishing. It’s that quarter of my soul, stolen by a cokehead highschooler in 2010. Three quarters of a wish.

Abby Romine is a sentimental poet from the San Fernando Valley. Her work is marked by melodrama, irrelevant humor, and premature greys. You can find her in your phone publicly @cyb3rf33lings or privately @abbyromine. While physically based in Brooklyn, she's just another girl online to you: abstract, waiting for meaning.