valium
i'm thankful, since i think i failed some conversational tests and/or my sociocultural profile seems to have disqualified from me ever getting prescribed benzos by an actual doctor (remember when [redacted] had the same doctor as me and was prescribed them and i wasn't), for the valium i bought from the pharmacy across the street from our hotel on our last day in cancun. i'm thankful for how easy it was to stand in the middle of racks of sunscreen and look at a laminated printout probably from microsoft word with rows of names and dosages and quantities of all the fun things and how my only regret was getting distracted by the idea of valium (since i had had xanax but never valium and there's something alluring about the word and the idea of it, [redacted], who i bonded with over love of these drugs, had really romanticized it) and ending up buying a much lower effective dosage of that than i could have if i had bought xanax. i'm thankful that since my relationship with xanax in the past had been always one of scarcity and fear and thus to hoard them in case of extreme emergency, i told myself i would use the mexico valium actively to improve my life in the present as a mechanism against the sunday scaries—if ever on a sunday i felt even a little bummed out, i gave myself carte blanche to take one (they were these little pink circular tablets). i'm thankful that i did it routinely the first few weeks and then one week midweek i was just like "oh wait i didn't even take it" and i did a few more times but mostly don't even think about the possibilty, which feels like really nice. i remember vividly when i was first on prozac walking to work one morning, a walk that was always full of anxiety for the day ahead, and just realizing that i was just enjoying the walk and i wasn't really thrumming with anticipation of entering the social space of work and times like that one are why i love drugs (and drug-like experiences), because they give me access to other ways of being and feeling than the default way, which in my case has always been so fraught and bad.
i'm thankful d and i, after a long smooth flat stretch, hit a small bump in the road, and i'm thankful we were eventually able to talk through it and i'm thankful i took a valium when we were still in it and i didn't know how long it would stretch into the future and i couldn't feel like that anymore and then we got out of it and the panic valium became celebratory and made a cocktail with mezcal and mango kombucha and leftover macerated strawberry syrup and did a few bong hits and ate a strawberry mango paleta d made and then some of a honey mama carrot cake truffle while we watched love island, where there was this scene of two characters who seemed to have a really good relationship which was then threatened when another man, who had recently broken with his first partner on the show, tried to spark something with her and she seemed torn but then there was this night vision footage of her and the first guy sitting on the steps of the villa together and him being vulnerable about how he thought that her sleeping in the bed with another guy (a requirement of the show's "recoupling" wouldn't bother him (and how much he cares about her) and you can see in real time this shift on her face where it's clear she's in love with him and then he seems to to recognize that in her and she climbs down several stairs to come closer and they embrace and it's just very beautiful.