For Every Second I Hurt/ I Love an Hour.
Recovery and sobriety are beautiful and painful. I’m clearheaded enough to see myself for what I am, afraid but accepting. I hate what I’ve done, to my friends and family and loved ones. I had to drop out of school because I was underperforming; drugs and depression go hand in hand straight to the cliff. I’ve had a near overdose that landed me in the hospital and I’ve made choices that stuck me scared and alone in a cold, uncaring world.
But for the first time in years, I’m able to stare it down. I can sit by the fireside with two great friends and watch the night sky turn pale approaching dawn. I can turn online and see the love of users, both active and recovering, pouring out to find a missing member of the using family. Heroin isolated me from the people around me, and kept me from myself. I wouldn’t lie and say that wasn’t partially the goal. I never wanted to be near myself. I wanted to get the fuck away, stay somewhere else for a while, forget whatever pain was coursing through my body so I could just breathe.
My breaths were laced with the ashes of a thousand cigarettes.
My blood was dripping languid, dreamy heroin.
My sight was clouded and black at the edges, nodding off to oblivion.
That’s not what I want any more.
A user posted here a little while back, talking about how she found her humanity again after she kicked. Her mother’d told her she always felt too much, too strongly. When she got clean, it all came back. Pain first, as is the custom. Getting clean is like waking up from a nightmare only to realize you’re hanging from a cliff. We all live close to death, either by heart or heroin.
Then, all at once, the rest of her emotion crashed over her like a wave. Everything together, almost too deeply to manage. We lose ourselves in the things we most want, and become addicted to everything. My general social vice is to become a sponge for the pain of those around me. I want to take it all and hold on, just for a minute or an hour or more, so the lives of those around me are, for those moments, manageable.
I love this about myself.
And if I can feel so strongly, I’m not the only one. I’m not scared and alone in a cold, uncaring world. For every second I hurt, I love an hour.
I am very proud of my sadness, because it means that I am more alive.
I no longer fall in love with rocks.
