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.
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