Turnings
Sometimes the spaces/times of turning can be felt, dimly sensed when they’re happening, not only after, in retrospect, when we’re telling our stories of ourselves to ourselves.
And sometimes we sense them and flinch, retreat, withdraw–we un-know them and they slide away, forgotten, until another time, if we’re lucky. There isn’t always another time. I’ve had so many already. Some people don’t get so many chances to turn, to change, to grow in new directions. I am not always thrilled about this–it hurts, you see, and it’s scary. But I know what it means to be given these chances, and I know what it means when we don’t take them.
Sometimes it means just staying the same. For me though, it doesn’t. It might mean stasis or backsliding for a bit, and then re-scrambling back, maybe, but stasis and backsliding are less safe for me, for my kind.
I sat in a room of my fellows earlier on, a new group but the same things I find in all these rooms where the immoderate of the world who have decided not to die for our immoderateness sit. One person was talking about how few of us get to sit there, how many suffer and die. Not that we never suffer. But we don’t have to die, not like that anyway. Not like my friends that I loved who died the spring before this one, one whose liver had been damaged to almost non-functioning but whose thirst wasn’t quenched by fear of completing the job, and the other who died alone in a house full of bottles. I could be either of them. I can barely keep myself from wanting to follow them, to keep them company like I used to, so they wouldn’t be alone. But I would rather die some other way, later, or now, but not like that.
As I was thinking of them and looking at these few fellows that I didn’t yet know–though in a way I know, I know–and I felt a sense of obligation. I am bound to those people I loved–love–and I feel a responsibility to them somehow in the way I live now. Or I should say I started to feel it in a new way. I can live in a way that they couldn’t. It isn’t right to trample on the life I have; it’s sort of like trampling on us all. And we are trampled upon enough, too much, far too much, as it is.
When I saw the dedication at the end of “A Scanner Darkly,” I cried, deeply, at what he said, of and for the “people who were punished entirely too much for what they did,” his “comrades.” He said of them as I say of mine: “there are no better.”
Tags: addiction, Change, Recovery, Grief, death, healing, scanner darkly, phillip k dick
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