There we were high, in a random house, because Josie believes the world is her friend. With another person, I would, immediately, say that jumping from one strangers house to another while more baked than a cheesecake is not a good plan. In fact, it is the beginning of Netflix Doc, where everyone is being interviewed about how they knew us. The thing is Josie really is that person… who befriends everybody and they her. 

¨We are going to The Breather,¨ she nodded. Josie had a strange tendency, when increasingly high, to get a new signature body movement and a desperate need to hear Disney music. Heading towards The Breather´s house, we were listening to the Hercules soundtrack as she nodded away. 

The Breather was one of the most unique characters I have ever met. Upon site, he seemed easy-going, smiley, and had the same level of vocal fry as a Kardashian for being someone who dedicated his life teaching people breathing techniques to re-regulate their nervous system. Josie, apparently, had signed up for his course, which ended up including a 3 night-stand, which is just 3 straight nights of them having sexing and mutually, disappearing from each other´s life. Yet, he contacted Josie, a popular publicist for record label artists, for some her marketing advice, and she, having no sense of any True Crime series, was like, ¨Sure, I’m high, but my friend can take right around 11:30 PM on a Friday.¨ Strangely, we did. 

Amaris drove because, out of all of us, he preferred to only smoke when he was about to go to sleep. Rarely, did he get anything but a body high, which was then followed by a mental panic on why he had yet to find love, if he was being ¨good¨ because his anxiety over his body and career had made him withdraw from his fellow gays and just feel safer hanging with ¨his girls.¨ Of course, we were helping him through his emotional struggles, but doing so slowly… because he drove when we got high. 

The Breather took us around his home, which was eclectic. A dimly lit, surprisingly spacious 3 bedroom in the Upper East Side… coughs ¨he got money¨ coughs… with every wall painted a different color:  his kitchen alone was pastel purple, forest green, and then neon orange. He had different Chinese emblems, figurines, and vases throughout, of which he would go on to explain how he was apart of one of the wealthiest, craziest families of China, and unleash his mommy issues within minutes of meeting us. As Josie lit Spliff 3, she kept one AirPod in her ear to ensure the Lion King soundtrack was still going in her head, which made me think she did not fully register what was happen to next. 

¨Yeah, so I´m planning to send an email to my mom, next week, that I died,¨ he giggled as she passed him her jay. He was not even high, yet, when he said that. 

¨I´m sorry,¨ I said. When I smoke, I, mostly, get mental highs, which is fantastic because I DETEST body highs. Like Amaris, my mind simply reels, which is why he prefers to have a smoke for bed: solidifying his tired body into a slumber. Yet , hearing that anxiety-inducing statement clashed with my induced calm. ¨You mind repeating that.¨

¨My mom is a crazy bitch who does not appreciate me,¨ he puffed. ¨So I’m going to show her by emailing her that I killed myself, but I want the email to look like it came from someone else, and then they forward to her my suicide note.¨

¨What the fuck,¨ Amaris said aghast and seriously considering rejoining the gays if these are the straights his girls were introducing him to. 

¨Yeah, do happen to know how to do that. I thought you know as marketer, maybe, after we discuss price and strategy, you could show me?¨

¨She works for a record label: not the CIA,¨ rebutted Amaris. 

¨Did you write the note?¨Josie nodded as I could hear, faintly, the ¨Circle of Life from her one AirPod. 

¨Yeah,¨ he said and laid back in his sofa couch like a movie character would in a staged scene of therapy. ¨I told her that she should not have married so many douchey men, and that she, basically, carried me through life like a purse she wanted to throw out. Yet, she has some really great purses so… that might not be true. She, literally, has the largest collection, in Asia, of Birkins.¨

¨So… you feel she loves her Birkins more than you,¨ Josie asked, in what I presume was her taking the character role of therapist. 

¨Yeah, she loves everyone more than me, but when she has a fucking breakdown she calls me. She’s the reason I breathe,¨ he sighed while looking at the beige roof and chandelier of glass shaped samurai. 

¨I don´t think you should do that,¨ I announced very loudly like a woman running through mist trying to find the nearest gas station, except the mist was my own high and the gas station was the last bit of logic, left in me, saying this man was stupid. ¨Why would you want to make her cry or not cry. How is that going to help you breathe better?¨

¨She needs to know she hurt me,¨ he stated simply. ¨My death feels like the only way she will know that, but since I do not, actually, want to die, and I really feel like this next course I’m making is going to be very lucrative, I have to fake it via email.¨ Never had I heard someone say something to strange like it was rationally profound. Yet,  I also could not judge him.. even if I did. 

When you have an abusive parent, as he claimed his mother was, often, you dream about dying. You imagine your funeral, and them coming: absolutely remorseful and regretful that they did not treat you right. Even in my head, I imagined my death would be when my dad loved me, but, upon our last visit, he even forgot I tried to kill myself… twice. That was one of the more hurtful notes of his departure: the realization that, like in life, in my death he would move on because he never cared for me. I looked at The Breather with pity for his excited derangement. On one hand, he was planning bigger moves for himself that felt too small for the biggest move he wanted feel: his mother´s care. 

I still wonder if he sent that email…. I got to ask Josie. 

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