my post-prandial drowse is lifting now after a pot of coffee. Just a roast beef sub I brought home and ate after voting. It put me in an opiate-like nod, sitting upright as if I was still conscious, but I was completely out by any other measure. Food is my dope, and caffeine my remedial coke. Both are licit, tame, and utterly acceptable. No risk.
I have come to associate heroin use with 19 year-old handsome boys and doe-eyed college girls. They are often at the end of their heroin careers when I meet them at the detox, and so, by extension, I see in them a bewildered 16 year-old with a needle and a question; is this the way? 'cuz 'The Way' that's being offered isn't going anywhere, it's got no juice, everybody pretends to be alive, everybody makes-up meaning, and I haven't seen anything real for so long that I almost can't tell the difference anymore.
Anything is worth keeping the ability to discern real.
I like the people at Narcotics Anonymous meetings. They're young—even the old ones. They are single mothers, orange-haired boys, delicate, slender girls with pierced eyebrows, and tentative black men in stunning fashions. They still have an essence of bewilderment, an expectant gaze which they lift often from the necessities of sobriety; their focus now is still that path they once searched for through a needle, a path we all hoped to find once. Some of us pretend we found it.
now, it's not like I tried the needle—I never did. Nor do I wish I had. But without a doubt, I wish I had been willing to shoot, willing to go any distance—even risk death—in pursuit of real life. If only I'd wanted to find the path as much as that, to be real so badly that I would do anything, even squirt into my virgin blood a septic stream of God knows what... I know, it might have killed me, or worse. But that's the way with life; it's not always how it is supposed to be. And would I have been courageous enough—once I got there—to come back, even after experiencing the immeasurable relief, and soothing sense of control that would come each time the tip of a needle would catch and lift my suffering flesh, and slip under my skin, and puncture a bulging vein.
To come back from there, I would have needed to be twice brave; brave to venture in where illicit dangerous things were done by desperate people, lamely searching for the way. And, when I finally despaired of finding the path I'd sought, brave again to venture directly back—if not actually, then at least apparently—into the original hopelessness from which I had fled, preferring hell. Maybe I'd have managed bravery twice—if I had managed it at the start. But those who really succeed are three times brave; after returning from hell, they do not meekly resign themselves to a pathless life of unanswered hope while over-grateful for surviving a lethal history. Instead, when success seems least possible, they start over, though perhaps more wisely than before, and they risk again more than they can afford, so again they might find the path, and resolve the question only each of us for ourselves can answer: Is this the way?
I watch these young people come into detox, their terror and agony is plain to see. I watch as if through a two-way mirror, from the dark side, and figuratively, their image and my reflection mingle. It is unknown to them, but the ghostly image of me fits on them perfectly.
it is 2:30 AM, and it's a very dark day in the United States of America. Just wait.
|
|
|
|
updated |