A Decent Human Being by Athena Nassar

The truth is I hate other people’s dogs. Their imposing stares, their smell, their excessive hair, their slobbery mouths spewing froth. I pretend to like his though. Why do I do this? Why do I put on this dog-loving facade? Because we are all creatures who long to be liked, and nobody likes people who don’t like dogs. I find myself doing a lot of things that I really wouldn’t go out of my way to do on my own time, but I just do them anyways to seem like a decent human being. That’s why I mechanically caress this dog and make these cooing noises as soon as I arrive at my friend’s house. You might not understand this at first, but people do it with small dicks all the time. I’ve realized that it’s almost some kind of American custom to greet someone’s dog before entering their house. If I were to just step over it and keep walking, I would be considered rude. 

Of course I didn’t want to eat those strange sour rainbow belts, and I definitely wouldn’t have done it if he wasn’t sitting right next to me, but I still eat them, because I traveled all this way to my friend’s house, and I don’t want to be an ungrateful, unliked human being. Who knows whether he would’ve liked me any more or less if I had refused them? Would he have really thrown me out on the street if I were to pass on his dad’s mystery weed gummies? Was this really a matter of eat pot or die? I guess I’ll never know whether my near-death experience was really worth it or not. 

The wrapper says the whole bag contains 500 milligrams of THC, or Tetrahydrocannabinol. I was never good at math, and I don’t really know what Tetrahydrocannabinol means, so I just decide to eat one strip and see what happens. My friend eats three or four of them, but he pops these things like cough drops, and if it isn’t already obvious, he’s a full-time stoner. He pulled these things out of his bedside table for Christ’s sake. Who knows what other bootleg snacks he has in there. He didn’t always do this stuff, but his girlfriend just dumped him. He tells me this as he tears off a piece of his sour belt and feeds it to his dog. Is that even safe? In a panic, I Google “what happens when you feed your dog edibles?” Then I Google “what happens when you feed yourself too many edibles?” Then I Google “can you die from edibles?” I do all of this in one minute. 

It would be so embarrassing if I had to call my mom to come pick me up right now, but I am on the verge of calling her to come pick me up. She drove me here, and she drives me pretty much everywhere, because I’ve refused to drive ever since I confused the gas with the brakes and stopped in the middle of the highway last summer. Maybe I could have avoided the whole thing if I didn’t have to prove to my dad that I could drive, but I just had to prove it to him. I just had to snuggle that dog. I just had to take these edibles. Maybe life would be better if I didn’t have to do anything at all. 

Whatever I took from that bedside table hits me like a truck, and I would’ve left right then if my friend hadn’t said that Alphonzo was on his way over. Every time I go over to this kid’s house I hope and pray that Alphonzo comes over, and he never does. Of course, this is the one time he is on his way over, and I can’t even move my legs. I’ve been too busy dangling my head off the edge of the bed to actually comprehend what’s going on. All those times that my mom has warned me about Murphy’s law, and I’ve shrugged her off just for this to happen. The last thing my mom needs is another thing to be right about. 

Now Alphonzo is on his way over, and I feel like I’m going to pass out or hyperventilate or die or even worse, puke in front of him. The flashing LED lights are just making it worse, but my friend seems to enjoy them, and I don’t want to look like someone who hasn’t done edibles before, so I just close my eyes and let the blood rush to my head. After a little while, my friend comes to lay beside me. He says that the LED lights around the doorframe make it look like a portal into another universe, and I stick my arms out as if to pull it toward me. He sticks his arms out too, and in that moment when we’re both reaching for the bathroom lights, I don’t feel like I have to puke. 

When Alphonzo arrives, my friend goes downstairs to get him, and I just sit there on the bed with that dog I hate and stare up at the ceiling. He has two of them. One looks like one of those white rugs that you wipe your feet on after you get out of the shower. I think the other one is some kind of abnormally large mutt, but I despise them both the same. Alphonzo hasn’t changed at all since the last time I saw him. His eyes, two rich pools of syrup, bore into me. Even with all the extra time I’ve had to think about what I’m going to say and how I’m going to greet him, all I can manage to do is awkwardly wrap one arm around his waist. 

My friend falls asleep within fifteen minutes of Alphonzo arriving, which leaves Alphonzo and me occasionally glancing over at each other from opposite sides of the room. He’s wearing these black basketball shorts that aren’t really doing a lot for him. I’ve never seen his legs so bare. They’re much skinnier than I thought they would be, but I suppose this is the standard for all legs that run track. All bone and no meat. The legs flutter much faster that way. I look down at mine and imagine two jiggly hotdogs flapping in the wind. Thankfully, I don’t run track, and I will never have the desire to do so. 

Some movie is playing in the midst of all this, and although I’m looking at the screen, I might as well be staring at a brick wall. I couldn’t tell you what I was watching to save my life. The whole room has this air of discomfort with my friend tucked under the sheets in a deep sleep, me squirming to find the right position on the edge of the bed, and Alphonzo lounging on the mini couch in the corner. He texts me: come here. I really don’t want to get up right now, but I do it anyway, because he’s just sitting there waiting for me to get up and magically come to him. I’ve been scrambling to get to guys all my life, so the motions are almost instinctual. I leave my place of rest. I make my way across the room. I squeeze in beside him on this couch that’s really only meant for one person at most. As I’m still adjusting both of my thighs to lay flat on the couch, Alphonzo grabs my hand. Except he doesn’t grab my whole hand, but just a few fingers.  

With this unnecessarily awkward interaction, I realize that there are a lot of similarities between greening out and falling in love. Of course, there are the key symptoms: an unshakable sensation of being paralyzed from the neck down, an accelerated heartbeat, cold sweats. Except with Alphonzo, it’s not really love, but more of an alternate, more appealing universe that keeps growing and expanding until one day I see him, and I touch him, and the universe deflates. 

It’s not like he wasn’t always around. In sixth grade science class, he sat across from me, occasionally tearing out paper from his notebook and drawing these funny little sketches. I was dating his friend Jacob Workman at the time, if you can even call it that in sixth grade. In junior year of high school, I remember hearing a rumor that he let this blonde girl blow him in the locker rooms. Later that year, he stopped me in the hallway and told me that he would’ve kissed me by now if he hadn’t known me for so long. What does that even mean? Is there some kind of rule that you can’t kiss anybody you’ve known for more than a few years? Had my kissability expired? In the summer before senior year, I saw him at a rap concert, and for some reason, I walked right past him. Then I went to boarding school in Michigan for senior year, and three years passed, and he probably forgot all about my kissability. If its life expectancy was in question back then, it’s definitely expired by now. 

Later that night, we’re all sitting in these lawn chairs by my friend’s pool, and Alphonzo asks me if I remember the time I dated Jacob Workman. I’m thinking: wow, this guy doesn’t forget a damn thing. I respond with something like “yea” or “yup” and scoot down a little lower in my lawn chair. I feel like I’m about to slip right off this thing, but Alphonzo and my friend are smoking out of a bowl, and I don’t think they notice me slipping down farther and farther into the abyss of the lawn chair. Alphonzo passes the bowl back to my friend and goes, “I can tell when people are high, and you’re high.” All my efforts to look like the pretty, chill girl have come to this. Me dozing in and out of sleep in some folding chair when I should be fucking Alphonzo’s brains out. 

Last month, there was this naked guy with a machete staying at my hotel. He was throwing furniture and TVs and lamps out of his window and threatening to jump. At the time, I thought he was crazy, but he probably just took these edibles. With all of this in mind, I look up into the darkness and inspect the stars, since my neck is the only part of my body that isn’t completely motionless. I think about falling into the sky, a cluster of blackberries, with my lawn chair and nothing else. I don’t know what I was expecting to happen. Maybe some kind of sex explosion like the one in the very last scene of Like Water for Chocolate. Or maybe a confession of his undying love for me, followed by a marriage proposal and a honeymoon in one of those rustic huts in the middle of the ocean. But none of that would’ve happened even if I was completely sober and even if my limbs were fully functioning. We had outgrown each other, and it wasn’t my fault or his. Sometimes it’s okay to keep walking. 

Athena Nassar is an Egyptian-American poet and essayist from Atlanta, Georgia. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poets.org, The Chattahoochee Review, Salt Hill, Lake Effect, The McNeese Review, New Orleans Review, Zone 3, Up the Staircase Quarterly, [PANK], Points in Case, DIALOGIST, and elsewhere. 

3 February 2022