December

I suppose today should not go un-noted, though to me it's not that big a deal.



Five years ago today was the last time I did heroin. I'd been clean since shortly after that Thanksgiving (more out of shock than anything else; I'd lost my job and gotten an eviction notice the same day, and it had startled me into a brief reform). I was alone, in one of the merciful interludes between bouts of the disease that was CR, and heroin was one of the few things I knew how to do to pass the time--but I was tired of it. Not so much of heroin, but of the life I was living; there was no time for anything BUT heroin, for getting the money for it, finding it, using it, getting ready to start over again. And the last days of the year 1999 seemed like as good a time as any to change my ways.



I remember thinking "okay, this is it--one last time" and going into the bathroom of my studio apartment (so I wouldn't have to share my Very Last and Final Shot with Tim, who had a sort of "mi fix, su fix" worldview--and among junkies, that's only appealing if you're the "su" to someone else's "mi".) I also remember thinking afterwards that it wasn't very impressive--I suppose that makes sense, considering I was on 150 mg/day of methadone at the time, which would pretty much keep ANYONE's opiate receptors busy. And maybe that was a good thing; had it been a wildly-impressive shot, I might have found a good reason to keep going. It wouldn't have taken much to get me started again, really; sometimes I think it still wouldn't. My thoughts of heroin are inextricably linked with the one time in my life that I remember being truly happy, and in the absence of happiness like that, heroin has become a sort of shorthand for happiness. There are times I still think about doing it. I don't like the life I'm living now--though I can reliably say that most of that unhappiness really IS about my job. I am in a rut, and since to me "happiness"="not being in a rut" and in my memory, "heroin"="happiness", it follows that heroin means somehow not being in a rut. Which--and this is my saving grace--is a lie, a lie I can generally recognize.



It's only some days, riding on the train from home, that I look out the window and think to myself I'm not done with it yet, not really. I don't know if I'll ever act on that impulse--though I've promised myself that if I'm ever diagnosed with a terminal disease and not much time to live, I'm going to take up all my old bad habits with abandon--and in the meantime...well, it's all about finding things to fill up the hours, I guess. Not a very productive view of life, really, but I'm not one of those people who can eternally believe that there's some greater destiny for everyone. Doesn't mean I don't have to keep trying; it just means that I don't have to pretend to be optimistic about my chances. I've been luckier than most, I know--I'm still here, and at least I can remember when I was happy, which is more than most people will ever have.



I sound like I'm full of self-pity today, and really I'm not (although anyone asking me about my plans for New Years Eve will most likely get their head taken off). I just think too much about what might have been, in the glaring absence of anything nearly as good.



The problem with vacations, you see, is that eventually you have to go back to the things that made you need a vacation so badly in the first place. And even though it's only Thursday, I'm already on the world's biggest, earliest Monday bus.