My friend "Ivy" is a heroin addict. Good times! (Eye Twitch). I think I could write 5 posts of long length and still not be quite done at purging myself of that statement.
There was recent debate this last Saturday if I've gotten better at letting go of friends and then I thought, no, I've just gotten better at accepting loss and disappointment. But honestly it's a call I never even imagined in a nightmare reality I would get. Hi, M this is W. We found her stash and we need to get her into rehab and we need a favor... Can you come watch her kid and make sure she doesn't try to go anywhere?
Sure, I found myself saying. What did you just say?! I think I just said, Sure, ok.
Part of me can't really find the words past: stunned. Partly not surprised now that I've read this
Narcotics Anonymous letter about the self-obsessed person that this happened to her. Because the letter as pat as it is, is all things I've always preceived about her. Of course my friend Matt sees it clinically as he manages a half-way house:
She is grappling with a very serious disease, that is going to need a lifetime of help fighting. (yes.) Her moms view:
I never wanted this for you. You are a shell of my daughter and I want YOU back. (yes.) Mine:
She's dead. A demon has set up shop in her soul and though she looks, sounds and vaguely resembles the girl I knew at 14, very little of her is left. Less fatalistically I find myself thinking, there's an 80% failure rate at rehab. Then I think maybe, she'll be part of the 20%, if she goes. And even then. It's going to be a long hard fight.
But the whole weekend I spent with her caring for her daughter, whose only mimic is a heroin addict I kept thinking: She's dead, and I'm talking to a ghost, a distant apparition that a demon inhabits. And she's not ever coming back. It's one thing to have a friend who is in an abusive relationship, because then you think maybe they'll snap out of it or that you'll be able to pull them from the situation... It always seems like she wanted to and then there was that switch where all she wanted was oblivion and since she moved to Tulsa I have a notion she's been trying to kill herself in various reckless ways for the past 7 years... And I can trace it back a long ways to when I knew her in the beginning.
It's not that I do not wish for her to return. I just know that she will never be able to. As none of us can from annilation. And it's not that I don't have compassion because I want her to be healed, but when and if she surfaces it will be to a battle worn fighter. And that's ok. She'll have my love and respect and I'll speak to her as someone who has known her for a very long time. But for now, those demons remain unexercised and what I encountered is the reality of someone who speaks and acts and
is a drug-addict.
Whose body is hunched, worn-thin and wasted to wane skin, and sinewy arms. And her once beautiful face reduced to pock marks and the poison that runs through her is erupting all over her face in sores as she abstractly itches and picks at it. Who strains to eat, who cannot finish a glass of water, who spasms and stoops on the ground as she shudders through the strains of detox with a popsicle in her hand. Who says, M, tell me about your aunt and uncle's fairytale because she knows there's a lesson in it. About how they had a house and a pool and two lovely children, and then they lost the house and the pool and all the money and how their children grew up shorn with pain. And how it didn't matter bcs they stole everything in sight to feed the monster, collecting cans on the street- It's a monster Ivy that only you know how to talk to. Yes, she says, I see the elephant in the room. No, I say, the monster in the room that only you think you can control. And you can't and I see you desperately fighting for a semblance of control and some part of you came out here to try and get control and only you who thinks its as easy as a formula of dates and expectations. But can't get past being angry at your mother and resentful at your brother and afraid that they're going to take your daughter away. But I know how this story ends, can end, and it ends with violence and sorrow no matter how great the hope, if you think this thing doesn't hold you in a death grip.
She, who told me- calm, because of the meds, that at least she didn't have to hook for a fix, who took up dealing and litmus'ing product to be sure it was cut clean. Cut. Clean. Who with caged eyes asked what I knew, why I was there. Who could only greet me as one greets a friend turned jailor. Whose daughter at 3.3 isn't nearly potty trained and first words were curses bcs of her drug addict father. Who knows mommy needs medicine for her tummy and how my friend thinks her daughter, a care-giver, is ok. And that in getting clean surrounded by squares and stiffs she's going to give birth to an alien filled with all the backwatered emotion she's been holding in all these years. And I say, all the toxic evil shit. The bad, the dark, the unspoken. And she says, It's ok to have secrets and the mentality of an addict is one who is claustraphobic and can't ever find distance from all the things coming at them. And I say, it's not ok to have secrets, not ok to constantly duck the slings and arrows of your life. I think, I thought... you were stronger than that, more becoming of triumphant movies and not ones like reqium for a dream, basquiat, and trainspotting. More willing to weather the storm and find a toe-hold...
And yet, you my friend were swept away and living wholly in a world I disdain.
