|
|
|
|
|
|
|
jessicaj
Registered: 05/06/09
Posts: 1
|
|
|
Reply with quote | #1 |
Perseverance
Don’t ever forget who you are.
Don’t ever forget where you came from.
Don’t ever turn your back on what you know to be true.
Not for one minute.
In any one day
His hair hung like strings to his shoulders. Skin pulled taunt outlining his face like a skeleton. Pupils pinned. Teeth reduced to crumbled bone, rotted down to brown. Sweat beads cover his forehead despite the cold, air conditioned room. A bag of bones. It’s not him. The friend I once knew is nowhere to be seen. His young, free spirit and devilish good looks replaced now by the devil himself in the form of a junkie. He smiles and dances oblivious for a moment by what he has become. Yet no one who has lost oneself like this is unaware of it’s presence for a moment. That’s why the drugs are necessary, to help us forget. Forget what we have become.
The next morning, we stand side by side in the kitchen.
I ask him.
“What happened?”
He begins a brief summation of self.
The description of his life reduced to a few sentences.
“There is this monkey. He is on my back. No matter how hard I try to get him off. He comes back. He screeches in my ears. I smack him off. He comes back. I cannot stop this. If I could I would. I have tried. It has me. I am living in hell. But it is what is now.”
Years later, I sit in the basement of a church across the street from a post office listening to old fishermen spin tales about love and whiskey. He walks in. Monkey nowhere to be seen. His hair is clean and cut, like him. I smile but he doesn’t see me. My heart sticks in my throat. I wait. Knowing that for the first time, an old friend from then, here to do this thing with me now. I didn’t have any friends or family walk my path, I sit quietly and hide my excitement. The meeting ends and we leave with a small nod of acknowledgment. I walk to my car smiling, thinking about our future of coffee talk about the good times turned into this.
Finally. An old friend in which to do this together.
He overdoses two week later.
I never see him again.
I know today that as long as they don’t die they still have a chance knowing from experience that the one thing you cannot undo is death. But I don’t always get my way. He becomes the first of many.
Still at times, my heart aches. Deep breaths come out in heaving sighs. Thick. Loaded with hurt. I visualize my heart cracking wide open to let the hurt pour out. The deep breaths lighten my chest for moments at a time. Time heals. It always has. I take it minute to minute at first, reassuring myself that each day brings me further from the newest heartbreaking reality of when a friend falls.
At times I risk safety, caring beyond what others might find wise. The hope that one sentence may stick with someone for a lifetime. Like others have for me. Other times, I just had to see people through. Not to their end, but to mine, in order to get to sleep at night. Beginnings. Ends. Middle of the roads. Left up to Him. I can only save myself. With Him. Only me. This new truth is hard to live by when I witness others hurt. My faith is strengthened by believing that the impossible is possible. The ones who die before me live on now only as examples of the serious fatality of this disease and as reminders of the daily reprieve necessary to maintain my position against it.
Everyone’s story has its own slant. Details make the versions different yet the underlying emotional malaise stays the same. It’s not really about a drink, yet, that is what connects us here. The drink of our choosing to conveniently drown out the pain of life. We went to it often enough and it changed who we were. No longer straight, we live crooked. Misdemeanors and felonies collected; a normal person turns criminal. Money gone; a housewife turns into a whore. A difficult past seemingly impossible to shake. The injustice of it all edged with a societal stigma that makes it hard for those who lack the experience to commiserate with. The ones who have been there are the only ones who know. Reaching yet again that disgusting space with an ice pick to the brain, eyelids swollen shut and that ever widening hole in your soul the size of the world. The place where one does not know how to physically stop yet could not emotionally fathom taking one more sip.
Over the years, I have seen people take the alcohol out of their lives and wait the drugs out of their veins and leave before the miracle happened. It took years, both sober and drunk, to realize that once the drink is out of hand, a life contented in sobriety requires work. The big life overhaul. Change it all. It became my one true shot at complete freedom.
Eventually, I gained enough courage to stop pushing life under a make believe rug. Going out on the edge in new ways, I did my best to own new realities. I had to learn how to withstand the waves that rolled in. Sober. Then maybe, just maybe, I would be able to become an asset to this world again instead of ending a statistic or some detrimental mishap of society.
It may have been in those missed conversations. Those small breakdowns of communication where I began to miss my mark. I had to start having talks about that which was painful to me. I had to start getting honest in every single area of my life. It’s not that I was a pathological liar or anything. I just had to start getting real about how I felt on the inside. Start matching it up with the outside for the first time in a long time.
Always tell the truth.
I began to, believing the honesty itself might disallow me to end up like the ones who went before me. Sick, locked up or dead. The opposite of everything I thought would happen, happened. The world did not cave in. No one ran for cover. Instead, an indescribable perseverance was ignited and the simplicity of the words themselves began to finally set me free.
|
| |
|
|
| |
