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name: will baker blogrollin' other sites: |
secondhand tools
Nothing lasts. Everything changes. This is not a sad thought, but sobering. Do you remember the scene in �Magnolia� where the cocaine-addicted girl goes on a dinner-date with the cop? Their conversation comes to an uncomfortable lull, and she excuses herself to the restroom. When she comes bouncing back, she breathlessly exclaims, �Let�s talk!� That was a date with me a few years back. A little bump would make it all better�it would make me outgoing, confident, interesting, sexy, bold. And it did for a while. The problem with cocaine is that it�s loads of fun�until it�s not anymore. You don�t see that line until after you cross it, and then it�s too late. By that time, you�re pretty hooked. You could have put it down and walked away before, but why? That�s back when it was still fun. Now it just makes you nervous and paranoid, but you do more and more in a rearguard effort to recapture the old euphoric joy. I always wanted to feel again what I felt the first time: Now I am fully awake! But the terrible truth begins to dawn, far too late. There is no going back. One of the sad things about it is that you think no one notices. The trade-off for the increased confidence is a decreased attention to social subtleties. You come to think you�re cleverer than you are. All of which is to explain why last night was so exhausting to me. I had coffee with a good friend � a truly fantastic man who I love like a brother � who has relapsed into a nasty addiction. I drink coffee and water like a dehydrated narcoleptic, so if you have to go the restroom more than I do, something�s up. And in this case, it was pretty clear what was up. Nobody can read an addict like another addict, and I spent enough years excusing myself to �powder my nose� to be hurt that he would think he was fooling me. And that he couldn�t tell me the truth. He looks so sad. He looks exhausted. The suffering of a friend is painful enough to watch, and it hurts all the more because I know that territory all too well. I know what it�s like to experience my own subjectivity as a house divided against itself. I know how it feels like to be sliding into the darkness�and to know that I�m sliding�and find that I am unable to help myself. My guts clench at the memory of being surrounded by people and so terribly alone. Afraid that my secret will be found out. Dying in a crowded room, and no one knows how to help. When addicts get clean and sober, we unfold unto individuals. An addict in her addiction is singularly unremarkable. She doesn�t have a personality; she has symptoms and typical behaviors. But when we recover, we get to gain our third dimension. We become unique, the way people were meant to be. Like Pinocchio before the Blue Fairy, we get to be real. And when addiction comes back for us, it tears all that away. No more freedom. No more easy days. No more daylight. No more depth. No more laughing until it hurts. We�re right back to being cardboard cut-outs of human beings, crudely going through motions that bear only an outward resemblance to a normal life. I hate addiction. I hate how it waits so patiently, always determined to carry its children back to its dark and desolate house. How reluctantly it lets its dear ones go. Nothing lasts. Everything changes. This is not a sad thought, but sobering. Every moment is ludicrously valuable. I�m thinking about all the times I�ve sat with this friend and laughed until tears ran down my face. He�s the kind of guy everybody likes. He�s confident and brave and handsome and funny. And I was sitting there with him tonight thinking �I miss you already. Please come back.� But instead, he excused himself to the restroom. Moving farther and farther away. As a little boy, I imagined that when you reached some magical age where you became an ADULT, you received a sort of toolbox full of shiny, powerful tools. The hammer of courage, the saw of discernment, the beam of wisdom. But it turns out that there is no magic point where you are now �an adult,� fully qualified to help with the construction of the human world. The days simply pile up, and at some point you realize that you�ve got more experience than expectations. Along the way, you accumulate a chest of rusty secondhand tools: friendship, humor, hope, perseverance, prayer. Tools on the order of bailing wire and duct tape. Life hands you these and says, �Here, these will have to do.� And the trick is to stick close to one another, and to do the best we can with what�s on hand. Nothing lasts. Everything changes. This is not a sad thought, but sobering. I want to be awake. I don�t want to take anything for granted. I want to help him, help anyone, because there are only these hands. Our hands. If hands are to heal, if hands are to hold, then they will have to be these hands. These are the hands that bear the only tools we�ve got. These are God�s hands. They will have to do.
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