These ridiculous stories are not new. My love life has always been messy and full of absurd situations, so I’ll be sprinkling them throughout this absolute stream-of-consciousness of a blog. Mostly as evidence that I have been, historically speaking, clueless. 

One sunny afternoon when I was 23, I stood in my living room in complete disbelief as my then-boyfriend and his friend casually lit up a crack pipe right there on my coffee table like they were pouring out Mountain Dew to drink.

You and I are thinking the same thing: how the hell did I end up here? How am I dating a crack addict?

Who, looking back now with the gift of 20/20 hindsight, may have also been a drug dealer. But to understand how I got there, we have to rewind a few months.

I met Ben the way most people met in the early 2000s: out in the wild. Probably at a club. Which, in hindsight, may have been my first clue, but at the time that was just how dating worked. Most of the people I had gone out with were also from a club meet, and none of them had turned out to be drug dealers. That I knew of.  

So we started dating. Nice dinners. Sunday drives. Normal couple things. At 23, this was one of my first longer-term relationships, so I didn’t really have a strong reference for what people were supposed to do when they spent time together. As far as I could tell, everything seemed perfectly normal. 

At that time, I also didn’t think much of the late-night runs to the 7-Eleven near his house. We’d grab Gatorades and then sit in the car talking. It felt intimate, like our little nighttime ritual. I also didn’t think it was strange that he always backed into the parking space. Always.

I’d sit in the car while he ran inside, and somehow he would see ‘friends’ every single time we were there. He’d chat with them for a bit, then as those ‘friends’ left, more friends would appear. It was like a rotating cast of acquaintances.

Sometimes our conversations would get interrupted because he spotted someone he knew and had to jump out to say hello. I just assumed he was way more social than I was. Reader I can not emphasize this enough I was oblivious even as you are adding up the pieces faster than I did.  

But as the sun streamed into my living room that afternoon months later, and the clear glass pipe filled with smoke, those pieces suddenly started cycling in my brain.

The late-night runs, the endless parade of ‘friends.’ Oh.Oh no. I may have inadvertently been going on runs with Ben and let’s politely call those ‘friends’ the clientele 

It also explained the one time we had to sneak out a window at a party. To this day I’m not entirely sure why that didn’t set off alarm bells in my head. Naivety, probably. Or blind trust. Maybe a little of both.

 And the parking thing? Not just a quirky habit. It’s faster to get away if you need to.