This morning I awoke clutching your name with such reckless devotion that it turned to dust. Each letter fell to the floor. I know where you went long before you vanished inside of your name, long before the grave you sank into your body like a river, I know how you found us. Guided by the low light on the horizon, the pipe is a beacon, the pipe is a lighthouse, you wanted to know how to remove the emptiness from yourself, we never understood it cannot be removed. It is not a pulsing seed in the gut, or a peach pit run into the mud. We weren’t drug addicts, we said, we were scientists.
We experimented each day. Lowered the smoke into the deep mine of the chest as though it were a rope with a hook at the end of it to pull the emptiness back out. We partitioned ourselves away to the dark piece by piece, did not remove the emptiness but further became it.
The mind of the addict is cunning enough to convince the body it is not dying. Houdini doesn’t have shit on an addict. He was able to convince everyone but himself he had vanished. Addiction is the ethereal art of forgetting that you are still here. I know where you went, with a syringe perched in your arm and whistled through the vein like a steam engine, with a crack rock broken apart in a blaze of light as though it were an egg catching fire.
I know what it is to walk out in an unlit street at midnight with and have a gun cocked in your mouth. I know what it is to discover the gun is in your own hand. The most dangerous game was the one in my own head. This is a game of mass. A road starts testing the mind.
Question - what do you see? Anything I want. This is the magic of perception. The difference between the addict and one who is drowning is the one who is drowning knows it. The addict will drink the sea until it becomes him. Even now, five years sober, when I smell whiskey from across the room my mouth still waters. I haven’t fed my skin to a blade for nearly a decade for fear of what I might let out.
What sleeps must one day wake, even when you sneak through your own life like a thief. I have spent whole nights lying awake asking why I made it, and you didn’t. I can still hear the gasps pouring on the outskirts of town as you vanished the needle inside of your arm and I swayed from the edge of a bridge. Neither one of us was any more deserving of this life.
I feel ill to even think it, but I have to thank you. Some days your death is all that stands between me and a drink. There were days I went so far as to hold a bottle in my hand, but couldn’t bring myself to swallow because your name was stuck in my throat. There were weeks I couldn’t walk two blocks from my door without being asked if I wanted some cush, some glass, some white some snow some jack ups and jellies some green some dust some rocks, some good shit. Each time I heard your voice ask me “how badly do you want this life?”. You didn’t deserve it then, but you got it. So what are you willing to do to keep it?
Please follow along, and as I did have to make considerable guesses for several parts as to what he said, please add in your own edits!
Michael Lee, if you ever see this transcript, please consider uploading your original! Many recovering addicts would love to see your words on a daily basis as inspiration.
