... Coke ...
the only part
I come from a world of cocaine. A crazy fucked up world where peoples' words mean nothing and their feelings mean less - if they can be found at all. A world where people don't "slip" they seem to deliberately drive themselves down. A world where nothing is certain...nothing stays and love means I have to forgive you no matter what you do. And what you do will always be too much to forgive.
It's not really where I come from, it's where, for the moment, I seem intended to be. My best friend is a cocaine addict. Not like the ones on TV. He's different. He's calm, intelligent, and quite peaceful when he's in the right frame of mind. He has parents, brothers and sisters, a history that's a real life like the one that I had. He's clean sometimes for maybe six months. Then he's not there at all.
He doesn't come around me when he's using. I've never actually seen him under the influence of any kind of substance. I don't know why. I have often sat around and tried to imagine him in a drug house sitting in a dark, grungy corner, surrounded by people he barely knows. The rancid smell of sweat from all those different people mingling with his smell, his hand shaking as he fumbles with the needle - the tip of which he may later break off in his arm. I try to imagine all that because I need to know the other side of it. Somehow I think I want to experience that kind of badness, not being perfect, letting yourself go completely. There has never been a single moment in my life when I have done that. Some part of me always hangs on, worries and then gives in.
I would like to be so brave that I could lift that needle to my arm, feel the cold prick and the pop as it breaks my flesh. I would like to be able to do that and to be free enough from the ties of reality. I would like to escape as well. No one is running faster than I am.
Need has a lot to do with it for both of us. He needs to be an addict. That's his way of coping with a world that he thinks has screwed him over. He gave didn't he? And he got nothing back, nothing at all. It's one of the walls that he has built up brick by brick between himself and the world around him. It stops his feelings from exploding, his thoughts from spiraling down and then it gives him the gift of numbness. I need him to be an addict. I need him to stay the way he was when I met him. There's a place in my life for someone who is lost, a little bit bewildered and really hard on himself.
It always made me feel good to have to tell him time and time again that he is good. I need one of us to be free. And who knows which one of us is right?
story and words and photos Copyright Charlotte Kinzie 2009.
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