Setbacks

There was that crackhouse in Tulsa. Waking up from three sleepless days of indulgent paranoia—the room takes shape with a new acrid sheen and the need to flee supplants the want to use. The urge to crawl out of my own skin, familiar, even pleasant in how it had once permitted indulgence, now finds its only solution, crawling out of that room.

Three days after I’d self-checked out—fled, really—from my penultimate stint at rehab, I found myself coming to, despite never really having been out.

In that moment, my life was ash. A volcanic eruption at the center of me had razed the foundation and then, slowly, swallowed everything that stood atop it as it sank into magma.

The yellowed stucco ceiling, cigarette-burned bedspread, the filthy shag carpet which seemed to gently pulse with life had been superficially viewed as though from a distance and through the lens of need. But in the shock of startled wakefulness, I had merged with it, and it with me. The only useful solution was escape.

I’d gotten some great amusement watching my compatriots’ mounting paranoia. One’s relentless examination of the peephole at the door, while the other slightly lifted the corner of the stained curtain to check the alley below. They stood affixed like sentries to their stations for three long days, while I giggled with amusement at the possibility of anyone caring we were in there.

How I longed for an FBI raid in that moment of awakening.

The crater of my life felt bottomless. Sometimes I imagined it like a black hole. I know that’s not scientifically accurate, but the pull towards the center felt just as unstoppable, an inescapable force dragging me towards it’s fathomless bottom. I pictured it tearing me apart at the molecular level. My microbiome unraveling, DNA strands evaporating as they neared the singularity, the point at a back hole’s center where gravity becomes infinite and nothing, not even light, can escape. Not even the bacteria survived.

Was this rock bottom? In the order of things, it comes after shitting myself at work, after the diagnosis of congestive heart failure, after atomic bombs had been dropped on my life time and again. Each of which are marvelous stories I might share sometime. Each bottom with its own seemingly new uncharted depth.

Longing for an FBI raid, on the shitty Tulsa motel room/crackhouse—seemed like actually more a desire to not have to crawl out of this pit myself.

Please Mr FBI, carry me out of here. Even if it means a life of hard time. Come and rescue me from this and hand me over to some other pit of despair, the legal system.

There was a sense, back then, that as long as I was alive, I might as well—if not must—seek out absolute zero. The FBI raid leads to prison, where eventually I’m killed in some kind of gang war. All this, flashes as perhaps easier than the path upward.

This was over twenty years ago, but the flavor of destruction still lingers. It’s right there on my tongue, like last night’s dinner.

I woke up on Sunday in a hotel in Alabama with the evidence of catastrophic wreckage all around me.

Postmates detritus littered every surface. A box of polished chicken wing bones. Empty dipping sauce containers, licked clean. Plastic trays that had contained bibimbap and bulgogi—scattered, smashed, strewn. It looked like a bomb had gone off inside a takeout bag.

Escape flashed as the solution, but there were countless variations and I’d be lying if I said one of them wasn’t eventual death.

One footfall onto the path of self destruction and the voices in my head, stifled for so long, grow empowered.

Throw it all away! They chant.

And I can see ecstasy in the images they offer.

The counterweight is just as heavy, extreme piety. The monk and the glutton doing battle within me. A cage match, in the prison yard of my mind.

The monk demands self-flagellation, pain and a cilice belt wrapped tight. The monk wants trickling rivulets of blood beneath my clothing, a scarred back from repeated self-inflicted blows. There is no reminder as good as pain.

The glutton whispers that the warm embrace of Uber eats, the comfort of filling myself, first with food and eventually substances, is mother’s milk. A soft anesthetic to dull the sharpness of being alive.

But there’s a third voice, quieter, speaking as if from a great distance. While the behemoths wage pitched battle on the precipice of my future, across a vast chasm a fuzzy figure waves his arms, trying to be seen.

From my hotel bed in Alabama, it’s as if I’m sitting stunned in a lawn chair on the edge of the grand canyon. Around me, chaos, war, blood and guts—biofluids splashed across my cheek as I await the victor. Across the vastness of seeming oblivion I can just make out a version of myself, mouthing only this:

Who are you, and who do you want to be?

Photo by Sonaal Bangera on Unsplash

And with that the chaos of the moment seems to unravel. With lightning flashes, both tracks of thought, attached to streams of memory, recoil and streak before my eyes. The years of succumbing to base instinct, coupled with the years of self-imposed purity, both of which collapsed under their own weight when pursued to their ends. That voice, the gentle timid voice of acceptance, showed me that the only path toward salvation lay in the middle, avoiding the extremes.

Who are you, and who do you want to be? Like a mantra, it took hold and carried me back to the present.

There was cleaning to be done, and some need to consider exercise and food for the day.

I have learned that the hole I dig is never as deep as it first seems.

Even back in Tulsa, I found that the only way out was one foot in front of the other. The steps might be uncomfortable, but they are simply what they are.

Setbacks will come and go. The path remains clear. It relies on just one question: which direction leads to who I want to be?

---