getting free

More than a few bloggers have been talking about the change of season recently. It's been one more reminder for me of how very much we are the same, more than we are different. It's almost Fall and I, like so many others, experience this season emotionally and physically.
It has a subtle beginning, this season. I first notice it in the angle of the sun. The way it shines on my chair has changed so very, very slightly. Then I begin to notice the intensity of the light. It has a filtered look to me -- like colors and shapes have been muted and rounded. They are softer somehow and slightly out of focus. And that is precisely when I begin to feel it.
Loneliness.
I can't even begin to tell how lonely of a kid I was coming up for fear I'll tap some darkness with which I am not fully prepared to handle. I am the youngest of four girls by many, many years. Combine that with the fact that we attended a private, boarding school for prep, and one can easily see that I was, essentially, an only child. I was an only child who lost her beloved father to divorce and child support wars and her mother to endless hours of work to spend time with a married colleague and a congregation that was more important to her than spending time with her last remaining child. To put it more bluntly, she "forgot" she was a mother.
I spent ages 9 to 14 totally alone; just me, my cat, and Boones Farm wine when I could get a "buyer."
Fall symbolizes the time my mother would be working in even more of a frenzy than usual. She was a campus pastor. Thus, the school year meant more people in the congregation. Fall was the time I would begin to live almost totally on my own. I could literally go for several days without even seeing my mother unless I went to her job. She was gone when I got up for school and I was in bed when she got home from work. I ate cereal or spaghettios or toast unless I went to her job.
They were tough years for both of us, my mother and I. I left her when I was 14 to go to prep school about 80 miles away from home. I never moved back home again. Her best was horrible but it was her best at the time. My mother is a outwardly cold, but inwardly kind woman; a loner by nature. She didn't mean to neglect me in the way she did. She didn't know what else to do at the time. I love my mother. I should hope to be as fine of a woman as she is. But she definitely left me with a legacy of the loner and a feeling of loneliness to accompany it.
Two years ago at about this same time I was three months deep into a $60/day habit of tar heroin (a rather lengthy relapse, so to speak.) It wasn't much in comparison to my once $200/day habit, but it was significant nonetheless. Let's face it, one still has to "get well" several times a day, whether the habit is $20 or $200. I had just fucked up a convention for my job that I was required to attend by ending up in the horrors of withdrawal with two days to go before I could get home to more dope. I had brought enough with me to last for a week, but had shot it all up in 5 days. So, there I was in Houston fucking Texas in the best hotel in town, kicking dope like a lil' bitch.
The alone-ness of that incident almost killed me. Still I used as soon as I got off the plane in Minneapolis and could get to my office where I had a stash of cottons I could squeeze until the morning hours when Hector decided it was time to get his ass out of bed and sell dope to the nagging junkys. It took another month for me to give it up completely.
It was October 18, 2005, and I sat in my car in one of the most exclusive neighborhoods in Minneapolis trying not to spill tar on the leather seat while I shot dope in the last remaining vein I had in my foot. The sun was shining through the sun roof in the same way it is shining today. I was alone. I was totally strung out. I was afraid of myself. I was afraid of everyone else.
The next day I got one of my old colleagues, who had started her own clinic by that time, to pull some strings and get me on Buprenorphine immediately. I had nearly been consumed by my own loneliness, but it in the end it was that very loneliness that set me free.
The picture above is from North Dakota. I grew up in that State; in those wide open spaces where its flat enough to watch a sunset for hours.
Kind of lonely, isn't it.