Craving and Surviving

I've come to a decision. It's one I've been kicking around for awhile, with pressure towards this decision from my mom but still one ultimately only I could make, since it is my throat the pills will be going down. I've decided to take an opiate blocker. Making a commitment. A white pill, made of what is essentially Narcan, same thing used to revive someone from an opiate overdose. Taken daily, it will latch onto the fucking demanding, hungry, ever twisting and scheming opiate receptors in my brain and then block entirely any smack I decide to shoot. And it works, I've (of course) tested it out before. It helped me before and I hope will help me again. It works for 72 hours after each dose, giving me time to stop and think before I act.

That doesn't however prevent me from deciding I'll just shoot crack instead when I want to run from myself; despite the fact that I hate it, I still sometimes decide it's time to see if I like it yet and try again, which always ends in me puking while my ears ring and my heart beats so fast I can barely feel each beat separately, my chest screaming in pain, while swearing to god if I just don't have a heart attack and die I'm never touching cocaine in any form again. The thing with shooting crack versus smoking it is, with smoking, it's hard to overdose. With IV, you don't know it's too much until after you've already shot it, and there have been numerous times where, had I not had smack to slow my heart down again right away, I think I would've collapsed and died. I've also been known to inject diphenhydramine- Benadryl. You could vaccinate me against every known abusable substance on the planet and if I were so inclined, I would still find a way to get high, even if it meant choking myself till I passed out just for the rush that comes before death. That is how sick my brain, at its very core, has become.

So while naltrexone will help, it isn't a magic cure. Either is the Vivitrol shot, given in your ass once a month and supposed to do the same thing naltrexone does- except I had to test that out, too, and a couple days after the shot, my ass still sore, I discovered I am one of that tiny little tenth of a percentage point of people for whom it is totally, absolutely, 100% ineffective. There IS no cure for addiction. This is a fatal motherfucker of a disease it is impossible to ever remove from someone, no matter what Scientology says (been to that treatment center too, it's where my college fund went, and let me tell you, there's no cure to be had there but many, many memories I'd rather not have of some abusive treatment methods- which is why the center I attended was shut down and the directors excommunicated from the Church of Scientology.) This disease will gladly and calmly wait years and years for me to let my guard down and when I do, there will always be a dope dealer down on Peterboro who will help me give my life away again and smile while he does it.

It's up to me to live the life I choose. A friend and brother in arms named Tripp, who is now in prison for dealing meth, made me write on my mirror here at my mom's house "I CHOOSE THE PATH I WALK EACH DAY" and damn if that pseudo brother of mine wasn't dead on. I've looked in that mirror to inject into my neck what probably amounts to multiple kilos of heroin since then and HATED seeing that phrase every single time. Because sick as I am, I am not stupid. I always knew it was true and I was making a choice to push the plunger. Even knowing what choosing not to do dope would mean, the misery of withdrawal, it was still a decision made to start that cycle again after each attempt at sobriety. The decision of using or of cutting myself loose from smack, what I felt for so long (and still feel most hours of the day, though I know it'll pass) was my only tether to the world.

My life, my existence, was as a junkie. Period. I didn't question that, I never asked why me, though I have wished I had a disease with less stigma, like cancer. I didn't stop to think, I just reacted. Pure animal instinct from the deepest reaches of my brain. What will it take to not be sick today and where do I begin going about that task. That was it. Sober moments, even moments on a withdrawal med like subutex or suboxone, were torturous because I knew I would and fully intended to use again at some point. I don't intend to use again now, though, though I am not nearly naive enough to think it could never happen. I'm terrified, honestly old fashioned shaking in my boots waking nightmare terrified, that I'll slip and use again. I need to have 14 days with no opiate use at all in order to start the pills, and every half hour I'm hit with another stomach churning craving out of nowhere. It's hell, it makes the withdrawal I'm still in feel like day three cold turkey kicking, and my mind just spins circles around that image of, say, a filthy rig that MUST be hidden somewhere in my room or the bushes out front or maybe under that one bush round the block from two years ago that might have a cotton with enough dope to feel left in it's plunger cap.

It is absolutely unreal, the power of those cravings. But somewhere, I read that a craving lasts on average 7 to 8 minutes if you don't feed into it. So when my stomach clenches and that picture of needle in vein blood registering plunger depressing hits me out of nowhere, I find a clock to look at. I look at the clock and think, "okay, 8 minutes. Probably more like ten since I'm a really sick one. I can do ten minutes of this, I've done months in jail and kicked cold turkey for days. I can do ten minutes of wanting to snatch the nearest purse and run to my dealer." And it freaking works! It works. I survive. I don't commit a felony, I don't end up dopesick and broke and homeless, and I don't die right then and there from sheer lack of heroin. I survive.

I survive. I have survived a long, long time in a hard, hard lifestyle, one that the president of the USA couldn't survive and I hope never has to. I wouldn't wish what I've survived on my worst enemy. But I survived and am at this point right here, right now, with four days totally opiate free and I think nine or ten days totally heroin free- and for the first time in a very long time, I have every intention of staying as sober as I am right now. Even if it does mean I start crying because one of the 25 cent ghost shrimp I bought today died on the way home, or crying simply because I started crying and then laughing because I can't figure out why I'm crying, and then feeling absolutely nothing for a second before crying again. I feel awkward, totally like a teenager in middle school again, don't know what to do with myself, but I am clean and sober.

I survive, and I am clean and sober. And I will keep surviving no matter what, and someday, I will find myself LIVING again instead of surviving. And that's why I'm clean and sober- because I'm ready to find out what living is like.

Rebuilding Begins When My Arson Ends

I've spent so many years circling in the clouds, searching for life as it is meant to be lived, soaring on false wings given by heroin. But it turns out that all along, the life I was searching for was never one I could see from the air. I needed to land and breathe sober air and take sober steps before I could see that life? Life IS that pain I run from. Life is that sadness, sorrow, regret and fear. But life is also moments of joy, of peace, of sometimes feeling nothing but okay. Life is placing one foot in front of the other with no chemical buffer between my feet and the ground and knowing that the simple fact of my sobriety does not entitle me to anything more or anything less than anyone else gets- life as it is, with it's flaws and uncertainties and pains and triumphs. Because that is what life is, that is what living entails.

I sit here with a pair of days with absolutely no opiates at all in my system, after taking the last tiny bit of my suboxone the other day. No suboxone, no smack, no methadone or even kratom. I'm in withdrawal, my entire body hurts, my stomach is revolting and threatening to rip it's way out of my abdomen altogether, but I've no desire to walk away from where I am right now, both physically and emotionally, because I want what lies on the other side of these last couple days sick. I have an abscess on my upper arm that I'm fighting a losing battle against with double doses of three different antibiotics, and one in my neck I'm more hopeful will respond to the pills, and even that pain is welcome, because it is REAL. I've made it through the seizures, I've made it through the sleeplessness. I have made it through the daily moments where I would gladly and without second thought cut out and sell my own kidneys for relief of this sickness. I know $20 would relieve this sickness, but then what does that do for the deeper root of the sickness, my disease? It would set me back behind that wall between me and life as it is meant to be lived, a wall I was so sure, so absolutely, entirely certain, I would never see this side of again.

I've been absent here and on my corresponding Instagram, which is apparently now famous thanks to the way viral news reports have spread about the community of #junkiesofig, because my phone was stolen, ripped out of my hand at the bus stop. At the bus stop, on the way to go meet my dealer relapse. My ability to contact my dealer- not a dopehouse, he is a call and meet dealer- that day and get him to meet me at the bus stop went with my phone. Funny how things work sometimes. Since then, I've been simply too sick or too weak to write or think or do much not dictated by my most primitive brain functions. I've managed to take care of what needs taken care of thanks to one incredible and absolutely priceless thing- my mom. My mom, who I thought I'd lost forever, though not physically, emotionally. She said, the day I told her I was done, that this is it and I'm not using again, that she had no hope for me. That I would be dead in a gutter someday anyway and me pretending to try just hurt her too much, that she had detached. And I could not for one second blame her or feel anything but absolute shame. Shame, but also a determination to prove her wrong. I think she sees it now as I do, I think she sees the change in my soul I felt that day I slipped up and used last week, the day I knew the drugs were the same but I am different now. And she has been there for me. She has seen the choices I've made and the determination to not go back, to not let myself fall.

Who knows what next week will bring. Who knows if I will even be sober tomorrow. At this point, I don't even think whatever gods there are out there that have kept me alive this long know what my future holds. But I do know what it felt like the last time I shot dope. How instead of relief, it was as though I'd injected fire into my very soul itself, burning myself down from the heart on out. The shame, the instant wish that I could just pull the plunger back and undo what I had just done, that desire for a do-over I've felt so many times in my years as a junkie. I know it felt all wrong, and it wasn't a change in the drugs that made it feel that way. It was a change in me, a change in my heart and soul and knowing for a fact that I have found a better way.

I don't need to live like a rat anymore. I don't need to live as a zombie. I don't need to be a bottomless junkie. I can make my bottom wherever I choose to get off the sinking ship. And I'm off the ship today. I'm on land, though it is still just the very edge of a beach shrouded in mist, the rest of which I cannot see and don't know what is around the next chunk of fog, but I know I am in the right place right now. I know I am walking the right road right now. This is not easy and it hurts like nothing else and sometimes it feels like I am burning and engulfed in flames still, but I know, I KNOW these flames will burn themselves out. I am going to build my next life of brick, quit relying on the flimsy and flammable matchsticks I've always used before in my rebuilding attempts.

The city of Detroit burned almost to the ground three times in her history. I have burned my life almost to the ground countless times. Detroit rebuilt and is rebuilding again from a different type of fire today. I rebuilt, and am rebuilding again today. My self-arson is under control today. I am going to make mistakes. I am going to hurt beyond anything I can imagine. I am going to cry, I am going to laugh, I am going to feel joy about something other than free smack. I am going to fucking LIVE. I don't know if this is "it," if I'll never be strung out again, and frankly, I couldn't give a shit less. Today I'm not strung out, today I'm not giving my life away to heroin. Today is all I have and today?

Today, I am going to be okay.

Seek To Understand as We Seek to be Understood

An addict's greatest enemy is always themselves. We are the only ones in the end who can hold needle against vein and commit the act of piercing that vein. 

But one of our greatest challenges will always be the judgement, hate, cruelty and anger people without understanding and with closed minds dole out so freely and without solicitation. I knew by letting it all hang out on Instagram I was inviting a convention of haters to form. Yet at first, I still let it get to me. Still let it form new wounds on top of old scabs and rip out stitches on things I'd thought were worked or survived past. I let their words bite me to the core, not the ones who just threw out things like "junkie" or "dirtbag" or other simple insults like that; I already know and accept that I am a junkie and when using often am more than a bit of a dirtbag, and am not at all offended when others take note of the obvious and attempt to use it as a weapon. I mean really, you think I don't know that, guys? I know it as sure as I know where every dead vein in my body is, as sure as Narcan makes for a bad fucking night. 

Plus, there's the cold hard fact that for whatever reason, a junkie is proud of being a junkie. No, not proud of our addiction. Not proud of the sickness inside. Not proud of the damage we cause. But we accept that we are addicts and wear the badge of the status of official junkie with a sick pride and defensiveness; we went through a living fucking hell to get there and gave away chunks of our hearts in the process, so it's only natural we would be proud to have survived as junkies. We are proud to have survived what would destroy 90% of the population. We are strong and we are fucking warriors. We wear it with pride around other addicts and when called a junkie, say "Yeah? Your point is?" Or "Goddamn right!" So that stuff doesn't get me. 

What hurts is the more complex and time consuming haters. Those who take the time out to post long, drawn-out comments explaining to us what a piece of shit we are, how we only want attention, have daddy issues, on and on. The ones with such closed minds they assume that we made a choice to become what and who we are, and therefore it's as simple as making a choice to not be addicted to smack anymore. I mean c'mon, it's just a fucking powder, right? You've only been chained to it for fifteen years- MAN UP and walk away already! It is not their words that hurt- it is the knowledge that should one of their loved ones ever find themselves suffering from the disease of addiction, that hatred and judgement is what they can expect. Not help. Not support. Not the ability to be open with their best friend about their pain and their struggles. The knowledge that if they are, they can chalk them up as lost forever. And that?

That fucking HURTS. 

A junkie judges themselves so harshly, we truly in our hearts- don't feel but rather KNOW- we are trash. Know we are worthless. A drain on everything and everyone. We live every day with not only the burdens of our root pain, which I've talked about before and will go into again at some point I'm sure, but the pain added on by our escape and what we are now powerless to stop and must submit to- the need, not want, NEED to get more. Our lives owned by that fire, reduced to ashes and smack. The acts of degradation so staggering most would just eat a fucking pistol afterwards. The fires we start and fires that consume what we once were and forever change our worldview, our self image, our reality and our future. Junkies live such hell every waking moment and many dreaming moments as well that when I see a closed minded asshole who refuses to self educate or ask questions or seek to UNDERSTAND, who chooses instead to attempt to further the pain we already live, I get hurt, angry, enraged- and then I get writing. I try to explain to them with kindness rather than their same weak and juvenile nastiness how the same way they think we are pathetic, well, I feel the same about them. Their ignorance. Their desire to belittle and attack and wound those souls already so close to broken, it's less than a thread we hang by. That is truly pathetic. A junkie isn't stupid. In fact, I believe the longer you've survived this mode of living, the more brilliant you must be because it is endless work, endless scheming, endless thinking and planning and split second decision making to be a junkie and stay high and keep away the withdrawal. And it takes the strongest kind of souls to survive the worst forms of pain. 

Addiction is a disease. It is recognized and categorized as such by the AMA, can be found listed in the DSMV and there is not a country in the world without addicts as a part of the population. Addiction is not a choice, not a lifestyle, not a goal nor a decision. An addict's brain, viewed on MRI, is literally PHYSICALLY different from a normal person's brain. We are not like you. We were born this way just like a person is born black or white, gay or straight. You may be an addict too and it may be as simple a difference between us as you not having that deep pain that kick starts your addiction, that drives you to seek out a way to escape that becomes the very thing which you fight with staggering violence to escape from. 

If you don't get it, that's fine. If you don't want to learn, that's not fine because ignorance is not bliss but whatever, I cannot force open a firmly closed mind. I can and will and do however ask that you show a little respect. Some common decency would be nice. See a photo of someone in so much pain, so tormented by whatever their root pain is, that they have a needle full of smack in their arm to try desperately to escape? Think about what your words will do. You cannot shame me out of my addiction. You cannot bully me out of it. You cannot do anything but add to my root pain- an my root pain? It comes from the very bullying that you are so cruelly, so thoughtlessly, so immaturely doling out. What purpose can your cruelty serve other than to take me instantly back over fifteen years ago to the first time I felt that same punch you're dealing out so coldly. 

Wake up each day, junkie or normie, fiend or not, and think, "What can I do today to seek to reduce the harm I do to those around me? What can I do to promote understanding and peace rather than judgement and hate? What can I learn today and how can I stay open enough to allow myself to see that which I am supposed to learn and they whom I am to learn it from?" Do that and maybe you'll find the world isn't half as black and white as you think. Maybe you'll see I'm not a bad person, I'm just sick. I'm not evil, I'm suffering from a disease for which there is no known cure. Yes, I made a choice to pick up the first shot but how could I have known that fifteen years later, I would be fighting still to escape that decision? And after you educate yourself I hope you can sit down and think, "Thank whatever god there is I am not in that kind of pain," rather than wanting to spew rage and hate and evil on the Internet. 

Seek to understand us as we seek to be understood. The stigma and judgement is what keeps us sick, prevents us from seeking help, from being able to take care of our disease with the same matter of factness with which a person would seek care for cancer. Hate addicts? Then the way to help wipe us out is to stop judging and start learning and become part of the solution rather than adding another closed mind to the problem. 

Because without understanding, I truly have no hope left at all. 

Alliances

My father was my one true ally. No matter what. He is the one who taught me all the most important things I know: never pull the trigger without a totally clear shot because to cause an animal to suffer for even thirty seconds while you get off another round is atrocious, and to show that animal compassion and gratitude and the utmost respect for the sacrifice it made for you. NEVER hunt for sport unless you intend to eat or use (not just mount on the wall) every piece of the game you take. That you ALWAYS have enough money to spare some for a kid's lemonade stand. To be self sufficient. To trust people to be good on the inside. To be kind to everyone no matter what. To help people fix flat tires no matter the time or weather. To use words rather than fists when you are angry. To catch and release once you've got enough fish for what you need, and always be gentle and quick in the death of those you keep and grateful for the gift they've given you. To show mercy towards everything and everyone. To make amends for your wrongs no matter how small or how old they are or how angry you feel towards the person you wronged. To never hate- ever. How to raise pigeons in the attic and calmly deal with the fallout that caused with your neighbors when they shot and killed my favorite one, Chirps. How to train dogs to sit, stay, hunt, retrieve and do anything else you need them to do- always with respect and compassion. That there is always something you can do to help a stray, be it a dog or a human. The name in English and Latin of every wildflower, every tree, every animal, insect, bird and fish in Michigan. How to identify a bird by sight, sound, eggshell, nest, or sillhouete. How to stand in the middle of a stream, flyrod in hand, and simply exist in peace with my surroundings. How hard work pays off if you allow it to. How to live in the city peacefully while your heart lies farther north. 

All of the lessons and knowledge and skills I need to live a life I only dream of now, while cravings and thoughts of blood mixing with brown liquid pain relief gnaw at my guts and cause me to retch. Nobody at the squathouse ever cared much about birds unless it concerned flipping them to cops. Nobody I bought smack from ever asked what variety of elm it was we met under (American, rare now thanks to Dutch Elm Disease.) It sure wasn't secret hunting spot locations I was begging for by the freeway ramp. And it wasn't great perch fishing conditions I was running from. Why then is this my life and not the one my father spent countless hours teaching me how to live?

My childhood was spent in the northwoods. Seeing in me what he knew in himself, my dad ensured I spent not a single weekend in this city. Friday after school, Dad loaded all the gear for our next adventure into the car and we were off. My childhood up until age 10 was absolutely, 100%, pure as driven snow PERFECT. I cannot ever remember being unhappy. I excelled in school and excelled in learning what my dad offered up in lessons Up North. Even our own backyard- the wildflower garden that after his death was allowed to go back to nature, which I've now turned into a wild berry patch with tangles of bushes filled with raspberries and blackberries dug out of Michigan soil with my fingers and transplanted there. It'll never be called anything other than "Dad's garden" though. We would catch a garter snake, bring him home for a week, and then I'd learn the lesson of why wild things belong in nature for myself, watching Slithers sit silent and miserable in an aquarium rather than slipping through the grass or sunning himself on a rock in the field where I captured him. It was always by the following Tuesday that I was begging my dad to let me skip school so we could go take Slithers back to his home where he belonged. Or Hissy. Or whatever kiddish name that one had been given. I did this same thing over and over, it being a hard lesson for me to accept, that I could not bring the wild I so loved home with me and have that wild be the same as when I visited it. That the snakes and birds and baby raccoons lived in their home, and I in mine, and our homes were not the same. They were not happy in my home like I was in theirs. 

I don't know quite how to describe what bullying does to a kid. How it totally and irreparably kills them inside. But the fact that the power of those kids' cruel and totally wrong words and actions and thoughts about and towards me eventually became more than the power of what my dad put in my head my entire life- that I was awesome, I was perfect, I was smart and I deserved every bit of my inner happy- goes a long way towards explaining. The words and the actions and the shunning the kids started doling out completely destroyed me. It demolished me. Set fire to my confidence and burned my happiness down. I became haunted, afraid, alone and scared of every new day. I could only fake sick to skip school so many times. I tried my hardest to live for Friday afternoons, when my dad and I would take off north together and the kids didn't matter, but the day came when those kids' words followed me North. They haunted me through the woods, shadowed me along the riverbank. That pain became a piece of me I couldn't escape from anymore.

I internalized their words. I started trying to be like them, stopped going North with my dad. I willingly and consciously pulled myself away from the one person who always understood me, always supported me, always loved me and always encouraged me. I willingly and consciously stopped going with my dad to the few places I always, always belonged- the woods and his embrace, the passenger seat of his car, I-75 North beyond Birch Run with old hippie music on the radio and my best friend at my side, the field with a shotgun against my shoulder and a dog out in front of me on point, Dad speaking encouragement and correcting my stance before asking the dog to flush the pheasant. The very last places and times I felt completely whole and content. I look back and I want to smack myself. Hard. Wake myself up to the reality that those school years do not matter. FAMILY matters. Inner peace matters. Joy matters. Wherever I found that joy and peace is where I should've stayed. I should've fought tooth and nail to stay there. And to walk away from my father? To willingly give up those weekends, those moments in the backyard, because it wasn't cool to be who I was? In all these years between that day and now, in my entire fucking life here in this realm, I have never and most likely will never again do anything else so absolutely stupid. So blissfully ignorant that that choice would end up being why I sit here now, running out of the suboxone I've now got myself hooked on to try to make this easier and planning my escape. 

My father passed away on March 16, 2008, at 57 years old. I had 17 months sober. I had gone hunting and fishing with him a few times in those months, was working back towards what we once had. Making amends. Living the lessons he taught me with him by my side again at last. I had just flown home from a visit to my sister in San Francisco the day before, and we went out to eat together, me, my dad, and my mom. Before I'd left, my mom had asked my dad if he thought I'd be okay in San Fran, if I'd stay sober. My father told her he trusted me implicitly. Over 17 months I had done so well and had earned that trust. But on March 16, my dad got up early to take our new dog hunting, his first work in the field on live birds, and he never came home again. With no history of heart trouble, my dad had his first and last heart attack in the field and died within an hour, the ambulance having just gotten there. My dad died on the half-frozen ground of March in the fields where I shot my first pheasant, with his dog by his side. I'd like to think he would've wanted to go just like that, but I know better. He would've wanted to go surrounded by his family. 

I don't get to ever feel that all-encompassing security of childhood again, but then no adult does. I stayed sober another six months before I let the same thing that sent me to the street the first time send me back again- the loss of that bond with my father. The night I went back, Devil's Night, I screamed and cried and pounded the steering wheel of my truck, begging my higher power to stop me, to send a flat tire, a car crash, ANYTHING to stop me. That was the first time I shot dope against my will and the first time I truly understood the power of the heroin I'd gone running to so long before to kill a pain I could've solved with the tools I had, the person in my life that was always on my side. 

I believe my father paints the sunsets. Delusional, silly, whatever. It is what I choose to believe. What I need to believe. And I'm starting to think he sends the storms that seem to follow me wherever I go when I'm getting high. Sends the sunsets to remind me he is always there, that it is up to me to come back to safety. And sends the storms to remind me what I'm doing is violent, vicious, and unstoppable once started. I watch funnel clouds spin and twist over the lake and I think how they are so much like addiction, striking with seeming randomness, not caring if you're rich or poor, inner city or suburban, a child barely out of pink sweatpants with cartoon dogs on them or an adult with a better grasp on life. 

This disease is cunning, baffling, and powerful, and I don't think there's a way out for me anymore. Some days I grab elusive hope, but usually it slips from my grasp and the world just spins on around my nodding empty shell, leaving greasy tracks along my skin as it passes me by. I miss my dad. His death isn't why I get high anymore; I get high because I can't stop. Or won't stop, don't stop. But really, I can't. Because I'm not willing to face that pain and shame and guilt and regret. So, so much regret. Regret unlike anything I've ever felt before, that crushing weight and stabbing pain and so much that's never far from my mind. So much I want a redo on. Just a do-over on those months between the start of my withdrawal from my dad and my discovery of heroin withdrawal. If God could just give me that one do-over, maybe this story wouldn't be the one it is. Maybe it wouldn't end the way I know it will. 

Maybe I'd have a shadow of a fucking chance. 

Weight On My Shoulders And Memories Everlasting

A friend on Instagram said something tonight that struck me, and got me thinking. It was about how people who are not addicts themselves cannot comprehend living so full of pain that the horrors of heroin addiction are preferable to facing that hurt. Most of my thoughts were actually memories that are so much the reason why I do what I do, why I continue to shoot smack knowing the end results- jail stints, abscesses, pain for those I love and the few who still love me, further damage to a liver that screams at me all day every day, homelessness, poverty in the most sincere sense when a loaf of bread is out of financial reach for me, and so much more. So much worse.

The beginning point of my pain was towards the end of elementary school. I never fit in, never had many friends. I switched schools every couple years because I was in the "gifted" program, which also hopped schools every couple years. So I never put down roots, never formed lasting friendships as a little girl. As kids got older, they realized I wasn't like them and turned into the demons I now find almost all kids can be at times. Bullying started, my interests and hobbies became taboo, and my spirit came so close to broken at a very early age. I have always loved animals, canines such as dogs and wolves especially, and that was apparently not cool or okay, and was a "boy thing." So in came the chorus of "lesbo" and "she-he" and words the kids and I had no idea the meaning of, all I knew was they were cruel and they hurt. So I buried that part of me. Never went so far as to hurt or ignore an animal but definitely didn't advertise my love for them like I once had. But still I found myself alone. Middle school brought it's own pain. Kids were even more cruel and far more devious in their bullying than in grade school. They also hit harder. So I quickly found an outlet and a crew- punk rock. Heard a song by Pennywise, "Straight Ahead," on a skateboard show when channel surfing and fell in love. Punk rock saved my life as much as it destroyed it by being my intro to smack. That anger, that energy, and that unity in the scene was what I craved.

After I fell into the punk rock crew I ran with, bullying didn't bug me so bad, although to this day I wonder if it's still the root of my self-loathing- if the words of those kids live inside me still to this day, that I'm wrong, I'm no good, I'm weird and a freak in all the worst ways. But now I carried knives and the tables were turned. Fuck with me? I bite back now, motherfuckers. I became the Hyena, fighting for what I believed in, savage when need be but gentle and caring at my core, showing only those on my crew my soft side. Eventually, as I got older and my skin got thicker, my outside image got tougher, my scars became badges of pride, I had a crew that viewed me as leader, a role I've always hated and never felt comfortable in. I am not a follower, but I hate that feeling of a group depending on you for guidance. My guidance sucked and cost some kids their lives, following me into smack. I rode the rails, hopped freight trains all over the country. And then, I started losing friends to death instead of judgement or my addiction, my scams, my criminal acts, nursing an ever-raging habit all the while. The worst event of my time on the rails were not those friends who overdosed and died in my arms, or those who I gave breath and pulse to and brought back from ODs, or even watching as trains severed arms or legs and changed futures once bright into bleak and limited. It was my riding and using partner Knot and the day he died. It's one of the memories that brings me the most guilt, shame, and a pain that once touched, lasts weeks. I touched it a few weeks ago for the first time in years and it plays through my head on a loop many times a day now. Should've left it buried but I suppose some things just refuse to stay where they're put.

Knot was a scraggly kid with no family, no home, and honestly no future beyond life on the tracks and smack. He was my male counterpart. He was my best friend and my perfect equal match. Dreadlocks with bits of string and beads and ribbon woven in here and there, pierced septum and a dozen self-done safety pin tattoos, two years into a smack habit to rival my own but with a spirit that refused to be broken or held down, Knot is who I think of when I think of heroin warriors. A kid with gumption and pride and a refusal to stay down when hit with whatever life threw at him, he rolled with the punches and threw a few punches as well. He was wise, he knew he wasn't going to settle down someday, he knew his life wasn't going to be long but was going to make damn sure he packed as much living into it as possible before the end. I don't know if he could've seen the end that would come though.

The day Knot died, or in truth was killed is a more accurate description, we had spent the night in some podunk little town in South Dakota, running low on smack and planning to head back to New Orleans where we could get work and gear. New Orleans and Atlanta were the only two cities in the south we ever visited together and except Florida, the only part of the south I've been in to this day. The north and the west coast were far more our style. I must've been around 13 or 14, the exact age escapes me always for some reason. I know Knot was a year younger and looked up to me; I hope he knows I looked up to him just as much, in truth likely more so. We woke up that day and headed back to the railyard we had camped near, planning to catch the first train on the right set of tracks to get us headed the direction we planned to go. While waiting, knowing we'd be getting more smack within a day, we did our morning shots plus a little extra for a nice nodded journey south. That cost my best friend, my traveling buddy, my protector and my confidant his life.

I always jumped first, always grabbed the handles first, chose our boxcar and our moment to jump. I'd ridden longer, had more experience, and just was generally good at judging the right moment. Except that day, I was too high. I judged wrong. I jumped too soon, the train was moving faster than my heroin haze led me to believe, and my hand lost the grip on the handle of the car. I caught Knot's hand slip out of the corner of my vision. We both for some reason, rather than finding footing and pushing away from the tracks as we fell, swung back and down and ended up on our backs.

I landed smack dab between the rails, under the train.

Knot landed smack dab on the rail.

There was nothing I could've done at that point. I know that at least. Though the guilt of knowing I made the bad call that day haunts me and will never be far from my mind, I do know that once the events were in motion we were powerless to stop them. The ad for Trane air conditioners, about "You can't stop a Trane," always brings me to my knees because of the solid and tragic, unfair and terrible truth of that statement. The train was moving too fast. It was over in seconds. Knot's eyes, blue as the sky over the Dakotas that day, never left mine. I could see he knew what was coming, could feel the rail under his back and resigned himself quickly. I watched fear, panic, then peace flash through his eyes while the rumble of the train filled my ears. He never made a sound.

I laid there beside him until the entire horrific train passed. Then I laid there longer. Finally a rail cop ambling along his patrol happened upon us. Or me, and what was left of my best friend, the person who I knew and who knew me better than anyone on earth. I don't remember much beyond the cop yelling for help and kneeling down beside me, on the other side of me from Knot. I must have passed out.

Knot had no family. His real name revealed that was the honest to god truth, that his parents died two years back and Knot was thrown into foster care. So his body is buried somewhere in a Potter's Field in a small town in South Dakota. The authorities were cold enough to refuse me the right to claim and cremate my partner.

I spent the last of my cash on a bus ticket home a couple weeks later. I didn't ride another train until September of 2001, when I was on a train along the east coast on 9/11 and know those planes flew right over me on their way to their destination. That was the last day I ever rode a freight train and I will never hop another car as long as I live. Part of it is knowing that with the damage to my body in the years since, I couldn't keep up, but mainly it's because I cannot hear a train whistle without feeling like I've been shot in the gut. I have no photos of Knot. I have nothing of his but a scrap of red lace I wear on my wrist, the same wrist as my piece of gray lace he tied on me so long ago; I've taken them off for periods but never again. I feel naked without them. I do have memories that I will never forget. Memories of open sky and flat country, of mountains and rivers and close calls and bonfires and fun. True, unfettered, untainted fun. Nights we didn't sleep, just talked. His face in the firelight, eyes sparkling as he told me about his brindle mutt from his childhood named Spot (which is why I named my striped cat Spot) and how he'd always nibble his fingertips to wake him up. Memories of days when it seemed like anything was possible and we were king and queen of the world. Running from rail pigs, laughing as the train pulled away and gained speed while the cop huffed and puffed along, growing more distant. Guitar jams before we sold those off for smack, drum circles with other hobo kids. Him having to literally cut a man with a knife when he wouldn't keep his hands off me on a stretch of lonely track.

But most of all, I remember his eyes. The clear, brilliant blue of the Midwestern sky in August. The way he was so easy to read by what his eyes told me about how he was feeling. I have never seen another pair of eyes the color his were and I know I never will. They were as one of a kind as everything else about Knot. No other eyes will catch firelight the same way, will ever reflect the clouds over a field of wheat the same way. No other eyes will ever have that instant connection with my heart and soul his had, the way they'd always pull the truth out of me no matter how hard I tried to stay strong and resist. If eyes are the window to the soul, then Knot is where he was meant to be- somewhere high above in that perfect bluebird sky, without pain or fear or the uncertainty of a life unmoored, a life in which the only home left was no home at all. But in those last months together, we were both always home. Our homes were each other, the security and safety and comfort of each others' presence. Knot was never my boyfriend- he was always my brother. My blood as sure as a leopard has spots. I get a measure of comfort knowing the last thing Knot saw as he left this realm was his home, boring those blue eyes into mine. Homeless as he was, as we both were, Knot died at home. This I know without any doubt.

I live with the knowledge that my decision, my bad call, cost the truest sibling I've ever had his life. Today, I'm building a relationship, a connection, with a new kindred spirit, Lepurd, so parallel to that I had with Knot it gives me chills. I know that's why Knot is on my mind so constantly lately. Because so much of Lepurd is like him, like the brother watching over me from his perch high in the brilliant blue sky his eyes let me glimpse even on the stormiest days. Lepurd has the same smile that makes it impossible not to smile back, the same softness in his heart and the same warrior's bravery, courage, and strength alongside that softness. He has the same pain as well, deep-seated and staggering but a pain we both know, a pain from youth that unites us in yet another way. We both love so much of the same things, and argue the same way Knot and I once did, in a roundabout way that seems more like discussing but with all the passion of a full out brawl. And we both have furry daughters who mean the world to us, two misunderstood breeds who remind us of our own struggle to be understood or, at the very least, not judged on our outsides or our modes of living. I've found much of life is circular rather than linear, and my circles brought me back to the same type of beautiful, kindred soul that led me to bond so deeply and so timelessly, so unshakably, with Knot.

You have to always keep your eyes open in this life; if you blink you may miss meeting the gaze of the people you are meant to meet. I met Knot on a shitty little street in downtown San Francisco, locked eyes and we moved as one from that day till the end. Lepurd and I met online and it was through locking eyes with his words via email I first realized I needed him without knowing yet that he needed me as well. Smack is present in our connection, but is not our connection. Smack is present in everything for me though, so it's presence means nothing. What means something is the depth and finality of the connection. The way it feels the same as it did with Knot- like if I lose him, I lose myself as well. Lepurd came into my life at a time when I was leaving life altogether, ready and planning to go. He gave me a reason to live. He gave me the courage to fight for one more day. He still gives me that. He stands tall and faces a world that's dealt him blow after blow and he grabs onto the victories in that life that's often so cold to him as it so often is to me- and he shows me it can be done. He is a warrior. He is a kindred soul. He is my excuse for continuing to live a life some say I should end out of mercy for others and society as a whole, he is my reason for continuing to live a life I sometimes feel I should end out of mercy for myself. He is my hope. The new knot around my wrist that won't let me forget I am more than my addiction. I am more than a junkie.

So that pain eats me inside but it also has allowed me to see in Lepurd the best qualities of Knot. That guilt and pain is part of why I prefer the torture and living hell smack addiction often is to the far deeper pain of my past. I do not expect anyone without an addict's mind and past to fully understand.

But I hope maybe this will help those without a junkie's life gain at least a glimpse into what my reality is like. Why I stick around heroin despite the quite obvious and sometimes close to unbearable pain that comes with it. Because that weight on my back is always lighter than the memories everlasting.