let it come.

I was sitting in the backseat of my roommate's SUV; we, between classes, had indulged our Tuesday ritual of tapas and half-price sangria, and they, the two roommates - they wheedled come onnnnn, let's just go to the beach, you've never missed class, you can miss five classes, come on, you know you want to! but no, I always said, no, listen, I left my whole life for school; I'd done the math and really, it's like throwing away X number of car payments just to sit in wet sand and chug vodka until the nighttime ocean feels welcoming, and they'd roll their eyes and crack jokes about backseat poetry readings, god, ugh and shake their heads and we'd wobble tipsily,grudgingly, to our baking & pastry class.

But this time - come onnnn, Lisa. Lisa. Come ON - I sighed, shook my head, all the requisite putting-up-of-fight - I can't, guys, I said, because I had to.  And I looked out the car window, and the clouds were glowing pink, purple, peach, the colors that turn the light golden and seem to ache in the sky as they deepen.

The roommate behind the wheel - we met eyes in the rearview mirror. She grinned, and swerved last-minute for the exit marked beach. And I closed my eyes to the sky and let it come coursing through me, felt it tingle and ache through my limbs, and I didn't think critically again for the next three years; I was tired. I was done.

____________

I wasn't in my 20s when I skipped my baking & pastry class to get drunk on a nighttime beach. I was 31. Spontaneous, maybe impulsive to the people who'd known me the previous ten years, here, I found myself The Stickler; The Responsible One; The Dorky Intellectual One, But Mostly Affectionately So. It was as ill-fitting as any identity I'd tried on without realizing that's what I was doing. It was uncomfortable, but I couldn't pinpoint why, in the same way I couldn't ever pinpoint why I'd always felt as though my presence in the lives around me was fraudulent.

So I sat on the beach and drank to killing the parts of me which had brought me here.

It didn't work.

It just brought her to the surface.

And it blows my mind, to remember 20-Something Me - makes me shake my head and whisper man oh man to myself. Blows my mind, because twenty-something-year-old me - that is one. tough. bitch. To have worked so hard and never let herself know how exhausted she was - I can't help but admire it just a little. I can't help but chuckle that, for me, such hard work is performed best in youth, when there's energy to accomplish it.

Mostly, though, I grieve for her.

I grieve for the darkness through which she saw every single thing in her life.

I grieve how little she understood, how hard she worked at graduating from one survival mode to another, and another, and another - adapting and observing, the exhaustion of changing colors to fit the wallpaper, without understanding that none of it was the same as identity.

I grieve that her toughness was borne of necessity; I grieve for how thoroughly terrified she was of herself, and every way she worked to Deal With Things Better Than She Was Currently Dealing, always. I grieve for how hard she worked, absent any sense of personal identity, to be Good; how hard she tried to out-scream a mantra of death, death for you, you will die with be good, be good, so you can be better. 

I grieve that, after hiding herself away for so long, and trying to do what she thought was Good, she gave up, because none of it brought change or relief. I grieve because part of her had to know it was futile; part of her had to know that this moment would come, that she would eventually fix her eyes on an aching sky and say, crystalline and succinct: this bullshit is not me, and I am finished with it. I grieve because it needed to be said, but she didn't understand that I am not Good and I am tired of fighting everything I know to be true didn't have to mean fuck goodness, because it is nowhere in me. 

I grieve that I can't forgive her for anything that followed.

But even so.

I grieve through a greater understanding of grace - for those who cannot see, who don't even know their need for ears to hear, whose worlds are so tormented and small, contrived and unstable, built on so much wet sand, forgive them - for those without identity, who work so hard; for those who spend their years afraid of what they could be, both in potential for good and evil; for the struggle to be without being known, or knowing; for eyes afflicted by dark, distorted mirrors of everything good and true -

- for they know not what they do, who they are, where they are, where to go, where You are. 

As hard as I fought everything in me, I never knew how grace waited for me in grief; I never knew grace until I just let it come to where I'd always been.

addict.

One of us, in chef pants and a ribbed wifebeater and day-glo-pink bra; one of us, in unbuttoned chef coat rolled up at the sleeves, and men's boxers, having stashed the chef pants in the car immediately post-class; one of us - the one with no evening classes - in seahorse-printed pajamas. The former two sweaty and stinking of dead food; the latter, with avocado-green face, waddling around hot-teal foam toe separators with lighter in her mouth, a pack of American Spirits and phone in one hand, glasses of wine in the other. All of us, settling together on the tiled front stoop of a house fifteen minutes from the beach, arms resting on drawn-up knees, side-by-side in the thickening evening, intertwined trails of smoke carrying deep sighs, secrets, truths, laughter: camaraderie formed of habit and need and the understood collapsive versions of acceptance we offered each other in these vile indulgences.

____________

I miss smoking.

It might gross you out; it might disappoint you. But I miss it fiercely.

I miss smoking. I miss drinking. I miss sex. I miss the times before I became aware that even food serves an addictive purpose for me - to indulge and numb, or withhold and punish. I don't have a particular poison; I am propelled toward poison by the drive to poison.

I miss addiction as balm, however temporary; whatever the means; however destructive the aftermath following that brilliant balmy disconnect, when I still believed I'd somehow circumvented what was dormant in my bones this whole time. Before I knew that addiction is no balm. Before I understood it as a slow, desperate death with a long game.

I know that, even as I sit here fidgeting for a yellow pack of American Spirits, I can't do it. I know I can't have even one. I know I would purchase a pack tonight for a single fix and destroy the remainder only to repeat the entire ritual tomorrow. I am thankful for, and brought to frustrated, hungry tears by the dead headlight in my car, for which I would incur a ticket I have no business paying were I pulled over, and of course I would be pulled over, because, seriously, let's all have a chuckle: have you seen my luck unfold? Ha. Ha. Freaking HA.

I know that keeping wine in one's house isn't a bad thing, but I know why I bought the bottle of sauvignon blanc that's in my fridge, and I know that I purchased it solely for deglazing the surface of my brain. I know the danger in recognizing that I function better, happier, while drunk - that nothing is as daunting, that I feel happy and myself when I am not myself. I know all the art a chef can create in a kitchen with a well-stocked selection of liquor, but I also know that My Drink is gin and soda with extra lime, and I know how much cheaper it is to keep my own gin on-hand than tell myself I'll only drink if I'm out somewhere, as though I'd ever limit myself to maybe two; as though you could ever treat oxygen as a treat.

I know I am lucky to recognize these things in their infancy; lucky that the basket of regrets I've accumulated is heavy enough to keep me from filling dumpsters; I am lucky to know that,with each time I indulge it, addiction germinates in my joints and creeps along my limbs like poison ivy.

But oh, when you're alone and jonesing for something, is it nearly impossible to disconnect the brutal truths of addiction from the comforting rituals that surround it. The suspended belief in those rituals is what I miss; the little intimacies of sharing a lighter or bumming a smoke or thoughtlessly grabbing you a beer along with mine. Loosening limbs and words, and the stupid, drunken illusion of emotional competence as hands and lips find each other under blurry Christmas lights; raucous laughter, or quiet conversations, for an evening, or just for a time. The built-in camaraderie of shared indulgence - that's what I miss. The guarantees of a window of connection which won't close prematurely because of the needs that prop the window open, and letting yourself believe that the little thrill of reaching for a second cigarette, packing a second bowl, cutting a second line, slipping a hand under a shirt, making a drive-thru run all mean I want to share this experience with you, rather than I need to stay in this suspended place. I wonder, sometimes, if there aren't different kinds of addiction: the kind where I'm only hurting myself, versus the kind where I'll numb myself at anyone's cost, where I can only reveal the most truthful version of myself as the need in me exploits the need in you while you exploit the need in me. Or, are they all the same? I don't know.

It is work, to form a long counter-game; to quiet the hunger by remembering, rather than repressing, the aftermaths; by reminding myself that the camaraderie of addiction is false: that what looks like acceptance isn't always intimate: that addicts are a scared group of people afraid to know anyone for fear of being known, afraid to call out anyone's sickness so as to hide our own.

____________

I'm sitting here on my couch dying to sit on my front stoop and draw crackling drags and breathe in deep, calming breaths full of poison which, I know, will eventually strangle and kill me. I straight-up love the sight of a sweating wineglass of chilled sauv blanc, and I'm dying to feel the fragrant thrill in the back of my throat and the warmth deep in my chest, despite the potentially poisonous interactions between alcohol and medications I'm taking. I am lonely, but I know better. I want all the cheese, but I'm not hungry.

I'm still pretty new to this, but I'm starting to understand what seasoned addicts mean when they say there is no such thing as a former addict. 

Lord help.