My Hubris

The roads are empty this morning as I drive to pick Molly up from a sleep-over so she can be at her weekend job by 7 am. I am thinking about what to write. The moon. No longer quite full, it hangs over the tree-line. Magical how the moon’s visibility is determined with reassuring predictability by the sun. Car heat cranked up against the cold, I sit in the friend’s drive and wait for my daughter to appear. Amidst messy winter bramble next to my car I can see a patch of green and white: snowdrops. A sweet harbinger of spring. I know where to find some near my house – I can get my camera and post them later – and write more about the end of winter.

But none of this clicks into inspiration this morning and I recognize that I am searching for something, anything to move me away from the subject I’ve been thinking about since finishing Bill Clegg’s Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man. Then, this morning I see the news that Whitney Houston is dead at 48, the same age N was when addiction won the battle.

I lived for years looking for distractions from the truth. Anything to avoid dealing with the reality of living with an addict. Hating myself, I welcomed the well-spun lies and chose to believe the crazy excuses for strange and bad behavior. Believing his promises, and making and breaking my own. Believing it was just a matter of time before he realized there was too much to lose, sure he would decide he loved us enough to quit.  Even as he shrank into a shell of a man, as his once hazel eyes turned empty – his soul swallowed into blackness, even then – an ember of hope remained that he would find an exit out of his drug-maze, back to us. Even when I’d had enough and finally was ending the marriage, I imagined his recovery as possible.

In the pages of Bill Clegg’s addiction memoir I glimpsed N. As I read, it was N I visualized living for his next hit, scoping out a bathroom to get high in. It was N I read about – a view of his secrets, of what he was up to, what he was thinking through all those missed appointments and lost jobs. In reading Clegg’s story, I stepped out of my own story of despair of living with an addict, into N’s world – the story of being the addict. This dark world, insane existence he lived while just beside me. And me a fool, so sure I held the light that could lead him away from his demons. What hubris in thinking there was anything I could do against such an enemy.