R was wearing a t-shirt with a picture of Robert Pattinson stoned in his kitchen when I met him.
Coming down off of my bender and blitzed off the Valium drip, I became his friend. I broke the ice by making David Lynch jokes he only somewhat understood. R had come to the clinic for a Benzo addiction, but not before stopping at a burger chain on the way and getting a mint shake and asking the techs if they wanted one, too.
We would smoke cigarettes together at the Adirondack chairs near the volleyball court, gossiping about the clientele. We’d share our scandalous stories, what we’d done in our past lives when we were wasted out of our gourds, the ashtrays filing up with butts of our cigarettes, the styrofoam coffee cups full and then depleted.
“We’re not going to talk about Judy!” I’d say, quoting David Bowie as Phillip Jeffries in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me while we bobbed around in the saltwater pool, our Irish skin getting sunburnt. He’d tell me about his romantic misadventures with men back home, how one of the men he’d met had called him a “Hoot-and-a-Half” but then never called him again.
Towards the end of our tenure at the clinic, we noted how it felt like all our friends had moved through a revolving door. How, even though we missed the “real world”, how we’d miss “The Bubble”. We found ourselves by those Adirondack chairs once more when we reminisced. April had become May, it had felt like a million years distilled down to only a few weeks. Our Irish sunburnt skin, the shade of a lobster, had pleasantly bronzed. We stared up at the palm trees and the South Florida sky, cerulean with no clouds.
Time is a flat circle.
Nightingale 
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