Love is not enough

Man, this fucking bitch..

done took off..

Fucking with some college graduate, punk ass..

Abercrombie wearing mother fucker..

Left me broken hearted, in the Chevy.

It's all good though.. you know why?

I got ME, bitch.

So, I've come out of my funk a little--probably due to my recently having been reminded that there is, indeed, sex after Christene, and it's not bad at all--and you maybe deserve a less cryptic run-down of recent events. Here it is in a nutshell:

I came home to WA bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, on a big pink cloud of sobriety and ready to take life by the horns. Christene and I parted on loving, tender terms, and even now my heart melts a little thinking of the tears that she cried into my chest, begging me not to leave, telling me that I could still stay and that she would pay my mother back for the Greyhound tickets. My entire bus ride home was spent deep in the throes of home-sickness--not for Washington, but for my love's ice-blue eyes, the beautiful swell of the hips I loved to run my fingertips over, the thighs I loved to kiss..

When I got home, we spoke of me possibly going to smoke heroin, because it had been so long. I decided that unless my homie made it very easy for me, I would not go; I felt too good about sobriety, and more than anything I wanted to keep my promises (and also, at this point, wedding vows--which Christene had also written for me, not just me for her) to Christene, which was always easier when I was sober. Well, as fate would have it, it was very easy; there was a ride and everything.

I got high. I talked to Christene throughout, and for a couple of days it was okay. I went to a friend's house, my homie Matt, who didn't have a phone or a computer. I didn't have a ride back to my mother's house, but I could have gotten there if I had tried a little harder.. I just didn't really want to go there at the time. Three days passed, and I returned to my mother's house to kick drugs for a minute.

I wrote Christene a text. I had missed talking to her very much, and wanted very badly to do so. I remember now that one of the things she first said was "Oh baby, I wish you had called me.. :(" which didn't really make sense at the time.

We had written wedding vows to each other, as I mentioned before. I don't have hers sitting in front of me, but one of them was basically:

"I will always be nothing but true, everyone will know that I am yours and only yours. Your wife."

Remember that, as we continue.

If you're reading this, maybe you have read the entry(s) that I wrote about Christene before. If you did, you know how I feel about her, and how I have felt about her. I wrote the entry about how she was "something to lose," the only thing I had to lose, on the night that I came back to my mother's. I stayed there a few days, but left again to live the way that I have always lived.. like a rolling stone. I hustled up some money to pay my warrants, but partied on much of it, and before long I was broke and Christene was on her way back from South Carolina.

I was ecstatic. I couldn't wait to see her. My sunshine was coming back, and the world would be in order again soon. On the day of her return, I didn't have a chance to check my Facebook until her sister was already in the bus station parking lot, waiting for her. I got a ride, and when Christene was with her sister, I called. "Hey baby," I said, grinning despite myself. "I missed you so much! You're back!"

She was less than thrilled to talk to me, since I wasn't there to get her when she had gotten off the bus. She asked me to get some heroin and bring it to her at her sister's house. It took me about two hours to hook it up, and I went to Snohomish to see Christene, my heart racing as I pulled into the parking lot of her sister's apartments. I held her tight when I got out of the car, though the air was tense and she was not as happy as I would have liked. We went inside, and we smoked the drugs I had brought. I told her that I was getting sick off of the heroin now, and she was disappointed.

We made love. As we lay in bed afterward, the fog of much-needed sleep creeping into my thoughts, she confessed something to me.

"Baby.. I have to tell you something, okay? When you didn't call me for those three days, and I was in South Carolina.. I slept with someone."

Never mind the wedding vows. Never mind that I had been true to her. Ouch.

I stayed at her sister's for two days, and that fact gnawed at me. Where there had been conviction and steel before, my love burning bright and declared to the world on my blog entries and my Facebook, in my life and among my friends, it felt cheap and hollow. My vows, which I had poured my heart into and taken pride in, carried with me everywhere that I went, were meaningless.. because she had broken hers. It had taken maybe a week after I had left South Carolina. Forever had become eight days. I was angry. She told me that if I were to continue smoking drugs, we would not be able to be together. I was bitter, and I told her to fuck off. I was not returning to my mother's. She backpedaled a little, and said that we could still be together, but that I had to work on my problem.

I promised her that I would look into inpatient treatment, and I did. We made plans for a couple of days later, that Friday. I made an extra twenty dollars, and offered to take her to the movies. She said that she would get ready at her sister's baby's dad's house, and I killed a couple of hours and called her.

She didn't answer. I called a couple of more times; no answer. I texted her sister's phone, called it again. Her sister answered.

"Christene doesn't really want to talk right now," she said. "She.. doesn't know how to tell you that she doesn't want to be dragged back into your world right now," she told me. My heart sank, and a cold chill ran up my spine. "What do you mean?" I asked her, but I already knew. Stupid. Tears sprang to my eyes, and I hung up on Amber. I didn't know what to do. My friends all looked at me. "FUCK," I said loudly, and stared at the phone. "Fuck," I said again, and the tears fell down my cheeks.

I told her that I would get clean, that I would call her when I could be a positive influence in her life. She said that she would wait. I stopped smoking heroin that night.

She didn't wait. I wrote her messages on Facebook, telling her that I had begun the process of getting clean and that I didn't want to lose her. She didn't write back.

I took the hint, and realized that she was trying to leave me for good. I told her that I understood, though I didn't. Don't. I spent each day of my dope sickness hating myself and my life, wishing more than anything that I could just hold her and have her support, her laugh, her kisses. I remembered the days in South Carolina, those perfect, slow days. I remembered her calling me Turkey Moose. I remembered her having to move to the other bunk sometimes because I had restless legs, and me waking up halfway through the night and bringing her back to bed with me. I remembered the movies, Golden Corral on my birthday, telling her how much I loved her. I thought of all we had come through, and the odds we had beaten to stay together. Even now, I love her so much that it is difficult to think of closing this chapter of my life. But I have to. I know that she is a co-dependent girl, and I know that she is not alone right now, probably wasn't the day after I left her sister's. I know that that is what she has to do in order to forget me. It hurts, and I am beginning to do the same now. I told her that she should go and find happiness, that that would make me happy. It will. I just have to get through this slump so that I can find my own.. and I have begun to do that. I had the most amazing sex last night, and I didn't think that anyone but Christene would ever make me feel the way that I felt during that tryst again.

She said I know you gave me everything, but love is not enough, love is not enough, love is not enough.

So good luck, Christene. And good luck to myself, too. Merry Christmas, everyone.

Wish in one hand..

Have you ever felt like dying? Have you ever felt like you could die happy? Sometimes I'm not sure what the difference is. I test and test and test my limits, and in this case even proclaim that I have found the answer; that I've changed, by God, and it's time to reap the harvest of happiness that I have sown. I declare my discovery with one side of my mouth while I second-guess and trash talk it out of the other. Who but yours truly could be so completely ass backwards and confused? Who but me could get so fiercely behind something so hollow and useless? You can't imagine what it feels like to constantly butcher everything that you love on a regular basis. It's.. elating. Thrilling. Miserable. I think that I must be addicted to the bitter sweetness of love's demise, because I can't stand to watch it in life. I have proven this time after time.

Or at least, that's what I used to think. I once was a liar, an embellisher; I once painted pictures of myself for others that had little or nothing to do with the real me, wearing a vast array of pseudo-attractive masks and legends that often had only the most insubstantial of roots tucked into reality, putting their strange and beautiful forms between the eye of the beholder and my true face so that I didn't have to recognize the ugliest pieces of myself. As long as these unsightly flaws and defects were hidden from everyone else, I felt that I could sweep them under the rug, as it were; I even became so good at spinning these fictional versions of myself that I could often sneak the truth past myself and fall victim to my own glamour, thus perpetuating the fantasy ever more efficiently, deceiving all and any who cared enough to look.

Self consciousness has ruled my life for as long as I can remember. The desire to be something that I am not is nothing new to me. I have found, in my newfound policy of brutally honest self-reflection, that there are many contradictions inside of me, many desires and lamentations and passions that by their very existence deny one another. I want to love and protect, but also be free and weightless; I want a home so badly that I overlook the one that I have found until I have made my way to the "other side," and the grass is not as green as it had looked from afar. My heart is not satisfied with all that it loves and desires when it is within my grasp; it glories in hindsight, always yearning to bleed for sweet memories or distant dreams that were tangible but have found a new and less erratic horizon to call home, leaving my whims and unpredictability to thrash and make their demands to an audience of none.

Lonely.

Purged.

Unchallenged.

Just the way I (hate need spurn) like it..

If this latest attempt at self-destruction has truly left me bereft of the one thing I love in this world, I will have succeeded once more in reducing myself to zero, thus perpetuating my beloved cycle for the umpteenth time and securing my place in Hell once and for all. The truth is, I don't know how much more of this I can stand. Every time I throw in the towel and decide that I need to put my nose back to the grindstone, I look around me to find that opportunity has already moved on to find some young and enterprising soul that will close their eyes and fall into its arms unquestioningly rather than peppering it with useless doubts and fears before taking that grudging leap of faith.

I thought I knew who I was; for years I thought that I could not do without the things that set me apart the most in the world, the streets that made me hard and the drugs that made me bizarre. I thought I could not bear to lead a life bereft of the senselessness and chaos that had defined me for so long, and now I am faced with a future that has nothing else to offer--not even the greatest truth that I have found and fought so hard to hang on to, my one true love--and am disgusted by its implications. I do not want the bitter sweet tale in my arsenal, because its darkly beautiful tones of loss and sacrifice do not interest me as much as they may have interested the liar that once lived inside of me. I am no longer the actor that I was; I am not the suave, fast-talking corruptor that I was, nor am I the care-free womanizing player that I once liked to think. I do not take pride in the things that I once did, and pretty new faces no longer hold any sway over me. I want to be remembered as a bumbling, good-hearted protector with eyes for only one girl in the world; I want to find her next to me in the dark every time I wake up in the middle of the night, and I want every tear she cries to meet its end against my lips. I don't want to be a hustler.. I want to be a turkey moose. I don't really know what to do with myself at this juncture, and I can't think of anything to do but pray for an answer.. for once in my life I guess I will have to take the leap of faith, trust in the universe to put things in their rightful places, whether that coincides with my desires or not.

New beginnings.

Well, folks, let me tell you something. I am back here in Washington state, and as awesome as I recall things being when I was out "running and gunning," as it were, I can tell you from personal experience that it just isn't that awesome. You know, when I first got into heroin, I had things to lose. After a long history of meth addiction and a few felony convictions, I was finally doing something worthwhile: going to college. I had my own apartment, a vehicle, and my kids came over every weekend to hang at dad's place. I had a Playstation 3 on which I watched movies with my lovely girlfriend Christene, and played a few radical games which I will gladly plug here: Borderlands, Dragon Age 2, Bioshock, MAG, and a few others that I would love to add to the list but am unfortunately a wee bit too stoned to do so at this moment in time. Hey, guess what, it's fucking legal here in Washington state now, so I can officially partake as openly as I choose.

Legislation here is just plain cooler than yours. :)

Anyway, I had things to lose. I was happy, maybe for the first time, though my brains were still so fucking stuck on my "glory days" that I couldn't really fully grasp what I had. You can't possibly imagine what I have gone through and what I have PUT myself and my pretty little lady through to reach this point of view. I guess I had an idea of what I had sacrificed to my idiotic quest for the ultimate state of mind, but it never fully hit me. When I got too sick without drugs I would cry about it a little, sure, and if I was feeling particularly open I would sometimes illustrate to a sympathetic and equally drug-addled ear what the progression from there to here had been like, but it was all garbage. Recycled bits of the "woe is me, I had a wife and family" sob story I had heard so many times in my years on the streets. Here's what some of it might have sounded like:

"Dawg, this heroin shit sucks. You get high for, like, a fucking week, and then it's all maintenance. You get the creepy crawlies and can't sit still to save your fucking life, so sleeping is out. If you don't have that next hit, man, it's a week of real fun. You know how much I've given up for this shit?"

And so on and so forth.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I had detoxed several times off of heroin and gone back to it anyway. I thought that because I stole things for a living and had done more drugs than your average person, I was somehow on some other planet, separated completely from polite society by a chasm of sex, drugs and rock & roll. Maybe I was. But I have come to realize that that is and was only one part of me, that there is a whole other person inside me that I have paid far too little attention to the past four or so years that I have been completely gone. When I stop and think about it, I am slowly gaining things to lose, and I like the feeling.

Take Christene, for example. When I think of Christene, I am completely and totally happy. I miss the little camper in Sumter, SC. I miss her smell, her kisses, saying completely ridiculous things to her that would often get an equally ridiculous response. I miss her smile that crinkles up her eyes and is often accompanied by her RIDICULOUS laugh which I love so much it is making my eyes tear up a little at the moment. I miss the way she would lose things and then blame it on me, and then when I asked her where things were she would just gesture at her thousands of bags and say "it's in my bag." I laughed with Christene, I held her when her father was a dick-headed drunk and made her cry. I fell in love with her all over again in South Carolina, because although I knew that I had something before, I knew now that I had something to lose.

Get it?

I am staying with my mother now, and although she hates Christene, I know in time that she will come to share my thoughts, because I was such a drug abusing ass hole that I couldn't keep used tinfoil from popping up all over the apartment when Christene and I were staying with her, and I also couldn't keep the focus of blame from landing on my hapless girlfriend (it was mine AND Christene's fault when really the only one responsible was me) when petty thefts would occur around the house, et cetera. Oh, and all of this while LEAVING her, sometimes for weeks, and treating her like garbage in front of my family. Not to mention the constant threats of breaking up with her if she discovered me cheating, displacing all of the blame I could get my hands on. I'm not saying that Christene didn't have some sordid encounters on her end, but I am saying that they occurred while we were NOT dating--typically of my making--and that they were more often than not simple retaliations or attempts to cope without my presence, which failed quickly even when we were apart for months. Anyway, she was always faithful while I found ways to sneak off with someone else as often as I possibly could. If I were telling you a story about Good Christene and the Bad Man that ruined her life, you would feel pretty bad for this chick, right? Well I'm telling you about a real girl. She is a brunette, and she is perfect. She made a choice to stick it out through a life that she hated with me, and I love her for it. There is not a fraction of the women out there with half of her spirit, and almost all would have bailed out after the first few rounds.

Anyway, there's that. And I seem to be discovering a family out here while I'm not busy figuring out how to backpedal and re-ruin mine and Christene's lives after fighting so hard to break free of the cycle, namely my mother's little nest that she has built for herself. The house out here in Lake Stevens is a good one, though my mother seems to be finding every little problem with it the way that she would have in any of our previous homes. She is a serial improver, and she has a heart-stopping to-do list at all times. It makes for one good-looking and homey house, though I shunned it in my earlier years because it meant that there was always a lot for me to help with when all I wanted to do was listen to music and smoke weed, damnit. My little sister Samantha also lives here, and she is fifteen now, which is the perfect age for me to tend the already-burning fires of heavy metal in her heart. She has an adequately dark room with posters of rock stars on her wall, and we hang out and play X-Box games together. I think there is more of that to be done in my lifetime.

Anyway, take it from me, folks. Doing drugs has got nothing on real life. It's all full of colors and feelings, not just raw need and the desparate struggle to keep those needs satisfied day after day after day after day after day. I need at least one year free of the streets in my life these days, and then if I'm not satisfied with it I can turn right back around and get high as a mother fucker. I have a feeling I might just keep on trucking.