the Discovery Channel is visiting the admissions department today at "..the leading substance abuse facility in the Northeast," where I work. And I'm late.
It seems they will be addressing the requirements of confidentiality by importing actors and actresses to play patients. We cleaned up a bit last night, but the office with the grubby now-grey (formerly burgundy) carpet, with the stained ceiling tiles, with the broken furniture and the holes in the walls, is a tough place to clean without a backhoe. Besides, it galls me to conceal evidence of the nightmare I experience there. In that office, I have to dish out the news that I refuse to know: This is all there is. Sorry.
They are just like me, living lives of agony, only they are calling, not answering, 800-ALCOHOL. Some shifts I am confronted with their whispering, aching voices—needing more than I will ever have to give—as often as five, even ten times a minute. If the world really is the way this child sees it, then the unrelenting barrage is too much. It's just too much.
It is way too easy for me to want you to suffer so that you will know what it's like, here in my life. That's not right. I have the idea that not too many really know what this is like. Kind of like a hysterical child who wonders how in hell you can be right there beside him and not screaming, too. He needs the evidence of time passing with nothing happening before he realizes he might be OK, and stops screaming. Sometimes, it takes a lifetime of nothing happening.
But he never stops wondering why you did not scream.
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