txts from last nite
I took an unintended vacation from posting here… I have fallen into this routine of sober living, a sort of comfortable cocoon, a place where there isn’t much to threaten my sobriety, or really even remind me of what my life was like when I was using, or even in early recovery. I still go to meetings regularly (four or five times a week is typical), and talk to and work with my sponsor regularly, but the immediacy of life for people who are still using, and/or in early recovery, is something that has just sort of left me. I have forgotten how life was like when everything was an emergency, was important, was urgent, was a matter of life and death.
And then, last night, I got a text from someone I know who recently relapsed. When he was counting days a couple months ago, he told me about how he had been a crack whore in a nearby major city on his (then) most recent relapse. His detailed confessional made me uncomfortable–his parents are friends with my parents, and he is a 40-something divorced father of two (also heterosexual when he is not on crack, and engaged).
I haven’t heard from him in a couple of weeks, but a few nights ago I received this text: “Who dya know that need a crack ho? Yea im a nut just bein real” I didn’t know if he was joking or not—a couple of texts later, I knew he wasn’t.
It didn’t just make me sad…. It made me excited, and not just sexually—my nervous system went into overdrive. For the first time in probably over a year, I was Jonesing. My mind was saying whatthefuck but the blood racing through my veins was tingling in anticipation.
It’s sick that there is this little part of me that lies almost entirely dormant, but was roused for just a moment there… Why yes, as a matter of fact I do know someone who would like to get totally fucked up with you, empty his bank account, and disappear for a few days with your hotness (By all accounts, he really is hot, and charming—even the 19 year old girls around here are attracted to him.)
It was a fleeting thought, and feeling, gone almost as soon as I recognized it, but it was real. Really real. Some people that I have talked to since have told me that may not entirely ever go away for me…. While I may have been able to repair some of my hardwiring, there may always be a part of my brain that remembers that first hit, when meth was perfect and good and the answer. It was a lie, but there is still a part of my pleasure-loving brain that doesn’t remember that—doesn’t remember the terror, the overdoses, the hurt. It just remembers that first hit, the fiction that everything would be ok now. That was what I felt racing in my blood, and it scared me.
I’ve been in contact with him since, offering to take him to a meeting. He declined.
And in a way, I’m glad he declined to go with me. I still want him to go, and I want him to be well. But anyone who can (and will) send me a text (a text!) that has that impact on me, for even a shadow of a second, probably needs to be far away from me. There’s a reason they call them triggers—for me, that feeling is deadly.
“Adam did everything we ask any addict to do,” she said. “He still went to meetings almost every single day. He spoke with his sponsor every single day. He had people around him at all times when he was exposed to drugs and alcohol.”
