2008-01-14
Whoa-oh-oh, I'm Not On Fire
Let's talk about deal breakers then.
Let's talk about blame and regret and fear and how I am the disppointed Queen Sarah, sighing now (again) for how sweet and gentle you were, with not even a little tiny hint of the gaping canyon in the center of your left elbow pit.
It's a big deal.
It's a Problem.
It means you can't ever tell me anything, ever.
Track Marks.
They look like open sores.
They look the way an alcoholic smells.
I can look at them there and you can see your soul slipping out the same way with an alcoholic, I can smell his sour disease long before he takes his first drink of the day, first thing in the morning and long after he leaves the room, leaving my house angry and crying and blaming me for..... for what? For his miserable disappointment and inability to trust anything more than he trusts his Carlo Rossi because he is innocent because he is drunk ergo he is blameless.
Track marks just lie there, not smelling and not laying slurring blame for a life not really loved. But they lie there
Like snakes, coiled and ready, always on the defensive and knowing exactly who they are.
They wait, raw.
Meanwhile,I'm generally sort of okay with snakes. I know what they are; I have no illusions or designs to change a snake into a dog. I can appreciate snakes for what they are though. They do not scare me.br But the snake that curls around and mainlines into the hole you've made for it is not okay with me. I have too much I care about to be anywhere near how near you are to that snake:
1. Unbelievable roller women who have more confidence and faith and trust in me than I have in myself on any given day. I hear what they are saying. I have to fake it sometimes but not often.
2. Options. I can go anywhere, anytime. I've got an education and great credit. I know the difference between motion and direction. I am constantly in motion and I am accomplished enough to not really need direction right now.
3. Friends. Years-long friendships with people who have struggled out of being immature assholes with bulimic god complexes and shitty marriages to become able to deal with the responsibilities wrought by the arrogant impulsivity of their twenties.
Earlier, before I got here, I'm sobbing on the phone with my best friend, 2,000 cold miles away and I'm in the parking lot because I have to go in but I broke down right there because it's the same thing but it's sort of worse. It's not the track marks.... it is.... but it's not. It's the disease. It's serious, intentional substance abuse.
I've done this already.
"I've partied, you know but.... I've never done that. I mean, does everyone in America have a substance abuse problem? Maybe I was lucky because the only thing I ever did seriously was smoke cigarettes. I've tried a lot of things and I used to drink..... like, hard but besides a few years of hitting Jack Daniels with a blur of the line between dependance and having fun, I was never into anything more than having fun at a party as far as drugs were concerned."
"Oh, me either."
YOU HAVE TRACK MARKS. THAT'S NOT COLLEGIATE EXPERIMENTATION.
I've done my best to live the right way. I've failed on many counts.
Most of us fail, and often.
But in the countless daily failures of the minutiae that we all have to try and try and try to not fail at, while we are all trying to not let our meaningless failures cause the cracking fire inside to implode leaving a smoldering, smelling smear of heavy wet bloody ashes..... Even in the awful mess of repeated daily failures, most of us do not scar ourselves with needles.
We don't choose week after week after month after year to drink until our friends refuse our calls and our successive beloveds flee to distant and opposite coasts.
I said that I have done this already.
You're different but no substance abuser is different enough for me to want a do-over - to risk bucking my options, my friends, and the women who believe so much in me for a guy who hated himself so much he had to chose to get fucked up, badly.
There's no hypocrisy here.
I used to drink a lot.
I hardly drink at all now.
I can judge drunks with impunity because I did it, I know it, and I've never looked back.
Maybe for a second last year, I was living back in it by being so wrapped up in Jesus but every minute I judged him for it and he knows that. He knew it when I was doing it.
At the time, I still loved him but even so, and all along, a history of alcoholism with which I am intimately familiar and aparty to precludes any bond I have with him, any reason for me to go back to him, any anything.
Track marks, no matter what the here and now means, no matter how clean the blood tests are, no matter for how long; they preclude any bond I might have had with you. Track marks preclude any reason I had to allow myself to fit into you.
Call me what you will when I go home tonight and I have a glass of Jadot Beaujolais.
Point out my addictions when you see me one night, standing outside of the bar and accepting the offer of a cigarette.
But know that I know what I am not. I know it because I know waht you are.
No matter your education or your books you've read or the care you take with the way you say things to me, the holes in your body tell me that a snake is lurking and waiting.
How bad it must be to have a snake deep in your soul, infecting you with the disillusion of a death wish, pushing forth through the surface of your skin, drugging you and scarring you and muddying your original potential to self-actualize with the so much puss and ooze that the self-actualization you might reach now, the potential you might embrace is so far reduced from what is was shown to be at the moment you tested in the 99th percentile.
Anyway.
I am not on fire.
I already burned for Jesus, see.
I know what time it is and I don�t take chances.
Remember?
I'm not a gambler.
And I'm not catching on fire for just anyone.
By nature of the family in which I grew up and the man around whom I formed most of my experience of loving, substance abusers ARE just anyone. They're the jokers and the jesters who have been part of me, forming me from the very earliest minutes of my life. I know them. I know you. I know addiction, self-loathing, and good-hearted women in love with good-timing men.
I am not a good-hearted woman. I lack tolerance and patience and I don't want to fix any of you. I want someone to fucking match me already and I keep coming up with the same loose, wine-stained lists you've all made of what you're going to do..... later.
I do not want later.
And you sir? You shouldn't have been relegated to being just anyone at any point in your extraordinary life. You were better than that all along.
Hell, you all were better than what you became, all of you who give snakes homes and drink until you are barely breathing.
You knew better like you know later doesn't exist and so you fold down into your need to hide from those snakes, those bottles.
But I am not a woman who can fold. Or go with what she's always known. YOU are what I have always known. Now I know I am the one who's better than something - I am better than what I've always known. I know how to work around snakes or bottles or pipes, what ever form the disease of drug addiction is in I know how to work around it.
Knowing how to do it does not mean I have to do it, or that I even can anymore.
Because I can't. I can't wonder about the later, wait for the snake to bite me when I knew all along what it was or for the bottle to cut me like it has so many countless times over the last 10 years - fuck, 34 years.
I get to be done now, I do. I get to be on my own, with my dog and my wonderful friends in the expanse of time that I know I have.
Being done is..... fine with me.
arizonasarah at 9:05 a.m.