nothing happens here, that doesn't happen there

So I asked him again, as that telltale smoke leaked through his lips just like always. "Do you think you could ever live without drugs?" Just as the time before, he did not answer, but stared at the wall as if it were doing some magical dance that only he could watch. I could see that he felt his words in his throat, but he pressed them down with the force of his inhale.

So I spoke not in questions, but in fact, "It will be me, or it will be drugs." He turned his eyes from the wall and followed my eyes. Tears were on my cheeks, coming to drops at the end of my nose and leaving spots on my shirt. I was begging him to speak, to answer. He asked me, "Please, sweetheart, don't."

"It will be me, or it will be drugs."
"Please, I love you."
"It will be me, or it will be drugs."
"I'm so sorry, I'm addicted."
"IT WILL BE ME OR IT WILL BE DRUGS."
"Please."
I packed my things in the car.
"Please."
"Have a good night."
His red, wet eyeballs leaked onto his cheeks.
I drove away.

<3ashes

how we spend our days is how we spend our lives

"You think you'll every have a life without drugs?" I asked him, his hand shaking holding the pipe to his lips. He inhaled sharply, his cheeks indenting and his eyes closing while his eyelashes fluttered like wings. He passed the bowl to the next person, and exhaled into the open air. A few minutes earlier he breathed into my mouth, warm and wet, and I thought maybe I was falling too. I could see how easy it was to lose yourself in a haze of thick, sour smoke and milky thoughts.

He stayed silent, lacing his fingers through my hair. He looked straight at me, his eyeballs big, red and wet. He blinked and a few tears caught the edge of his eyelashes, he took his index finger and wiped them away. I looked at his hands, they looked too old for him. His fingers were wide and calloused from guitar strings and songs he learned from a monastery in France. He used to say that drugs didn't keep him from his closeness with God, so he didn't see anything wrong with it. Maybe I didn't either.

But maybe it bothered me because it felt like he was missing something. He thought there was something that life itself wasn't enough for, that I wasn't enough for, that even God wasn't enough for. He needed something else, something that made everything less real, something that made it okay to say things you didn't mean and never finish your work. Drugs were an escape and a great excuse. He could get away with anything.

He whispered, "I love you." I held his hand adjusted myself sitting next to him so that i could take the bowl from the person next to me and hand it to him. His hands still shook. I thought about hitting, about just letting myself float away to whatever world he was in, that they were all in. But that was a world of numbness and of giving up, a world of the unreal. I preferred the real.

"That doesn't answer my question," I said as he took another sharp, inward breath from the pipe. The lighter's flame was hitting his finger, but the high was worth a burn or two, he wouldn't feel it till the morning, "I asked if you think you can ever live without drugs?"

He exhaled again, deep and long, and the air in the room was slowly enveloped in gray clouds that hit the ceiling and fell again to run along the floor. He put his hand on my hand, and said nothing.

i know a place, oh i know it so well

I underlined a line in my book before turning the page, and the man at the counter got up from his seat and took the one directly in front of me. I was surprised at his abruptness, but not uncomfortable or afraid. it was mid-morning at a Huddle House and there was nothing indicating anything particularly foreboding about the man. he was older, considerably so, with almost no hair and thick glasses. He smiled, a full-toothed white smile. I smiled in return, strangely serene.

"I wanted to say what pretty hair you've got, honey" he told me, glancing to my head as if making usre it was still pretty. My hair fell down over my shoulders, it was getting long, and almost matched the fire-engine red of my long coat. "Thank you so much," I replied to him through a broad smile. "My wife's hair was that color," he said, his voice dropping along with his smile, "Red hair has always been the most beautiful to me." I wondered if she had left him, or if she died seeing how old the man really looked. He wasn't repulsive though, he seemed to have aged in the way that Paul Newman had. He had lost his youth, but the dashing gentleman beneath the old face had not dissapeared. His eyes were wide and expectant.

"Where is she this morning? I asked, doing my best to be non-chalant. "She left me a long time ago," he said almost in a whisper, "Died the morning we were planning to see our great-granddaughter being born. I went, with the camera and the card, we both signed it, and I said she was too sick to come. Didn't have the heart to tell 'em with a new baby, waited a while for that. I haven't seen 'em really since then. Hadn't really seen nobody." I wondered how old that little great-granddaughter was now. How long it had been. How long he felt it had been. He reached across the table and touched my hair and I did not flinch. I let him brush my face, I may have let him touch whatever he wanted. I might have gotten up from that table right then and gone home with the man old enough to have a great granddaughter. The feeling of pity was so strong and sour in my stomach I felt like I was going to vomit. Loneliness was aching in this man in front of me, so much that he reached across dinier tables to brush nineteen year-olds' youthful cheeks. I wondered how many morning he was here, eating breakfast with his meticulously folded newspaper waiting for a young girl with red hair to sit down. Perhaps I looked like his wife.

We sat in silence for several minutes, until I glanced at the clock and saw I had ten minutes to make it back to campus for drawing class. I told the man thank you and to have a beautiful morning, and that he was very nice for talking to me. He looked at me with a content face, his smile returning wider than before, "You are a beautiful lady." I nearly cried, and walked away then to keep from doing so. I paid for my breakfast and waved at the man as I walked out. He waved back, revealing he had a wedding band tattood onto his hand. I hadn't noticed it, seeing as how I didn't think to look at his hands. But he had been young once, sitting in a tattoo parlor with his red-haired wife, kissing her lightly on the forehead as he had their ring etched into his skin. As I walked out and glanced back into the window, he sat staring directly where I had been sitting, pressing his thumb on his ring-finger, as if spinning a band that he had once worn, but long since removed.

we hold these truths to be self evident

i told her, there is no shame in this. i told her that there were no directions for how to deal with this, no one could ever prepare anyone else for something so awful. i told her that there were certain inaliable truths in the world, and one of them is that you will never have to bury your child. if that truth ever turns out to be a lie, to be some sick coverup of nature to make itself look less menacing, you automatically recieve pennance for any of your actions. you should never have to choose your daughter's headstone. no child should ever have a eulogy written by their parents. there should never be memorials for children because children should never die. we believe this like we believe we will stay glued to the ground, that turtles are slow and snow is cold. anything otherwise is against all nature and reason and leaves us bewildered and lost in a world we once trusted, and now understand nothing about at all. it creates a pain inside that inhabits the very marrow in our bones- we bleed loss. we are asked to believe and we are betrayed.

she said, i hate to be a grown woman crying to a teenager.

i cried back and told her, holding her large hands, no one ever gives directions for this.