♠

You are too skinny. Your skin looks bad. You are sitting on the floor of a filthy hotel room. Your friends are hookers. Your boyfriend is in jail. You are wanted in four counties. Your girlfriend steals from her parents. Your kids have forgotten your name. Worse, they know your name and they’ve said it desperately as you lay in a heap on the bathroom floor. You haven’t had a job in years, or a bank account, or a car without cigarette burns and a falling headliner. You have a burner phone. You trade your food stamps for cash, your body for dope. You smoke two packs a day. You could be anywhere at anytime, you have no home base. You sleep late into the day. Your clothes are baggy and filthy. Your clothes aren’t yours. You wear a hoodie in the summer. Your spoons aren’t for eating. You do your cooking in a bathroom stall, you stopped dreaming after the first hit . You’ve got schemes and you are good. You know the courtroom well, the highway better, the trap house best. You’ve forgotten smells, sounds and hobbies. You think God is dead. You died sometime, you can’t place it. I see you.

I see your photographs on my feed and I hear you calling. I feel your pain as you walk past, a shadow of something that used to be. I understand as you struggle to pretend you aren’t dying. I would like to call you out for all that you have become, but I know the smell of defeat. I know uncooked meat. I know when it is time to turn a simmer to a sizzle and just how counterintuitive that seems. 

The best thing that can happen for you, my filthy, lost friends, is to embrace total devastation. You are soft bacon, marinading in the fats of your mistakes. This is a recipe for a lifetime of suffering, but you came here to get high, so get high. Get high and crispy. Get burnt. Get as close to dead as anyone can, but not so far as we all will. I am rooting for you & I hope to see you on the cooling rack someday, sun-kissed, smiling and unscathed, save for the torment of memories that will serve as your updraft. 

♠

These are the things I wish daily I could communicate to people who are still living in addiction. There isn’t much hope that any of them will read this blog post, but if only one…