The bitch of it is, I still use in my sleep. Weeks and months can pass and I’m fine — I’m actually putting clothes on each morning and going outside, not necessarily looking for work yet but at least looking like I’m looking, buying groceries and talking to the neighbors, sometimes even digging in the dirt out front with an old spoon as if I might actually have a clue about gardening — and then out of nowhere, my own Brutus brain knifes me between the ribs, gives me a dream where someone I know pops up on the street or plops beside me on the couch, who shakes, in a playful kind of offering, a tiny dropper bottle that looks like Visine but is most definitely not Visine, and without even a second’s hesitation I take that bottle and dropper some fentanyl in my eyes and just like that, I’m high as fuck. Or maybe what they offer me is a pill and a plastic cup of Jim Beam and blam blam I slam them both down. Or maybe it’s a needle or maybe it’s a patch like the doctor used to give me back when “recovery” meant learning how to walk again. But those aren’t the details that matter. I take the hit and feel the cold familiar glow swish through me like the long-denied promise of Mama’s Love, then wake up panicked and maybe a little bit screaming, flopping the cat off the bed because my legs are kicking like I’m pedaling a bike in the worst way, and I’m high, I took drugs in my dream but in real life I’m high and it’s fuck.ing.terr.i.fy.ing! So now Nala’s holding me and calming me down, stroking my head and telling me to breath like a person and not a running dog, and this helps because Nala’s my anchor and too, she’s my life vest — she keeps me grounded yet keeps me afloat — but it also hurts because I’ve done this to her and will always be guilty of doing this to her. As long as I dream, I’m a weapon in wait, some sick kind of bomb that hurts only the one person I love and who’s only loved me. Meaning nobody else has loved me but Nala. Yet in my sleep, she’s my Caesar, and I’m Caesar too, I guess, since it’s my brain that puts the Brutus to us both.
So maybe we fall asleep again wound tight in a pheromone knot of one another and maybe the cat forgives and nests again in the blanket valley where the hillsides of our hips come together. And maybe in the morning we do come together or maybe we just get up and make coffee and I help her dress, not because she needs it but because it’s an intimacy I could die for, rolling her nylons slow up each leg, knitting together the zipper’s teeth to draw taut her skirt around the aching delicacy of her waist. It’s thrilling to know marriage and time still leave some things unchanged, keep delicious some delicious things. She looks sharp. It’s devastating. I pity the boys who have to hide their boners whenever she has them stand and speak in class. But not that much pity. I brush her hair while she recites to me verses by Rabi’a al-Basri and if in no other way, this is how I know she still feels about me all the good ways I feel about her.
I love You with two loves:
with longing and a love because You are worthy of it.
As for the longing,
it involves my remembering You and none other.
As for the love of which You are worthy,
it involves Your lifting of the veil and my adoring gaze.
Yet I have no praise in the one or the other.
The praise for them both lies wholly in You.
That one’s my favorite. A holy woman’s erotic love for her God. Who wouldn’t face-plant and kiss the sacred ground at the prospect of such worshipful adulation focused upon their mortal flesh? I brush her hair and Nala seduces me with poetry, then she takes the brush from my fingers and looks in my eyes and I know, we’re both Rabi’a and we’re both her God. Then she kisses me goodbye and kinda sucks my top lip (which is fuller somehow than my bottom lip, and that’s hot, she and I both know my full top lip is hot, and that knowledge — how we both know we know — that knowledge makes it hotter when her tender mouth sucks hold then reluctantly lets go), then she goes off to school for another long day so now, once again, I’m alone.
Whether it’s a good day or not, that’s how each morning goes. Because being a user sometimes means being an actor, means getting good at pretending everything’s fine fine fine. And when I’ve had the dreams of needles and droppers, everything is most definitely far from fucking fine. I’m still recklessly, painfully high (how come the body’s able to do that, replicate precisely the euphoria of a drug in the absence of the drug, and why can’t it do it on command instead of getting losers like me addicted to synthetic junk?) and I absolutely hate this feeling. Because being high means I’m betraying my wife. And I’m so tired of being poison to my Nala.
Sweaty and twitchy in all this shame, I can’t go outside and walk around, can’t buy food, can’t wave at strangers. Have you ever been afraid of failing at something so basic as wagging your hand hello to a neighbor? Ever feared they’ll understand exactly what your failure means? I can’t even really get dressed. I walk around the house in panties and a T, going room to room staring in total confusion at the physical evidence of our life together. Like, what the fuck is this hairbrush all about? What spooky two-pronged snake woman slithered out from her nylon skins and draped them over the bathroom door? What’s the purpose of this unmade bed with its smells and its body prints of sleep? What’s the function of this cat? With Nala gone, none of this makes sense. My life is senseless without her. So why am I here? Why am I here?
It’s almost enough to make a girl want to go out and get high. Just blot out the universe in a wash of Mama’s cold Love.
Almost.
There’s another verse by Rabi’a I love, one Nala sometimes whispers in the night:
They know the how,
but We know the how-less.
Holding me tight as I thrash against the Scooby-Doo nightmare of my relapse. She tells me and tells me again, it’s we who are in this together.
So I don’t tug on some sweatpants and go out sniping for a dose. I don’t ring up any of my old gang of heads, all of whom would gladly come running to ferry me back to the bottomlands because there’s nothing a junkie hates more than another junkie who’s gotten clean. I don’t even call my doctor to complain of the fierce pains lancing through my leg — which are real, my leg really does hurt still a lot from getting run over by my pig stepfather, but again, that’s on me, if I’d really wanted to manage the pain of having my femur ground to dust, I’d have actually tried to manage the pain instead of high-diving into the shallows (I know that’s not true, but shit, if I give my doctor his fair share of the blame, it’s too easy for me to forgive my weakness and with no ill conscience fuck up my life again, some more. It’s an uncomfortable fact of recovery, how sometimes to see the scene clearly, you’ve got to self-delude.). No, I don’t do any of that shit. I lie down on the couch beneath a knit Afghan because at least the couch makes sense to me. I turn on the TV because its nonsense is a comfort. I curl up on my side to take the weight off my bad leg and the cat, in time, makes a nest on my hip so I guess she has a purpose after all and, in her reckoning, so do I. In this stasis wherein nothing worse can go down, I keep myself steady and keep myself bound and wait for my purpose to come home.
Douglas W. Milliken is a queer composer, artist and writer based in Saco, Maine. The author of several books — most recently the novel Enclosure Architect and the experimental family history Any Less You — he is also a founding member of the post-jazz chamber septet The Plaster Cramp. His honors include a Pushcart Prize and awards from the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, Glimmer Train, and RA & Pin Drop Studios, among others. www.douglaswmilliken.com
ELEVENTH HOUR LITERARY 