The Lifelong Waltz

The ritual was always the same: dab the spoon, drip the water, light the fire, drop the cotton, draw it up, flick the chamber, burst the embolism-causing bubble.

I always took a moment to admire how impenetrably dark the chamber became once its hollow filled with the tar-laden soup. It’s been thirteen years to the day since I last loaded that sharp, sterile vessel, plunger cocked at the ready and fired away.

God, it was heaven—in that moment—when all the noisy clutter dropped off. The voices that surrounded me: parents, friends, lovers. The voices in my head that seemed to be at constant odds, screaming across the pool of my subconscious. The deep end telling me I was worthy of the world and all its greatness, the shallow end saying everything else could wait, just one more dose, one more day, and tomorrow, everything would be daffodils.

It’s been so long. I remember less of the spine-pinching rush and more of how I felt internally as my consciousness slid beneath the steaming grate of society’s jet-black streets. I was safe down there—that was my favorite part. I had just enough light, enough visibility to see where to step next as I wobbled on each day’s tightrope. But no one could really see me down there. They might notice the whites of my eyes and pink of my lips glowing through in slits of light as I peeked out from beneath, but that’s all I would let them see. I was in my world now. My special place. All that mattered was that I stayed there and returned there at all costs should I slip up and begin to emerge.

Despite all of that, somehow, be it the grace or the fucked-up sense of humor of whatever deity tugs at my strings, I got out.

Here I sit today, truly feeling life in all its grit and glory. My body aches from work, head pounds from stress, ears ring once again from the voices. Sometimes, I feel like I made the wrong choice. Like I should have let it dip and twirl me all the way into its cave, never to return. This new life I’ve built is hard, often dull, and unrelenting. But it doesn’t take long before I come to my senses. I remember the way it wined and dined me, then broke me down. Every day, the periods of bliss got shorter, and the suffering lasted longer until I returned to that crutch that always awaited me, propped against the rock at the mouth of its cave. That crutch creaked and shook the more weight I put on it, until that day, thirteen years ago, when it snapped and the ultimate darkness took over.

I woke up on the sticky, putrid bathroom floor of Dan’s Weiner Hut, a popular local spot for Chicago-style dogs, rig hanging from my arm and still tied off. A large, muscular man was heaving over me, pressing repeatedly on my chest. The sodium-orange light on the ceiling formed a halo behind his head, and although I don’t believe in God per se or even know what the man’s name was, every night when I shut my eyes, I see his face. In the light surrounding him, I feel a presence that I can only explain as otherworldly—a presence that has directed me toward the light and further from the darkness of that cave ever since.

I try to appreciate the common struggles of humanity now. We all suffer, some more than others, some more internally than externally, and vice versa. But I find solace in knowing that we who choose to embrace the unpleasantries and occasional horrors of life without pulling the comforter over our eyes will never be alone, will grow ever stronger once we heal and that the grass truly is browner on the other side.

My daughter plays in the other room as I reminisce on my youth. She has my eyes, my cheeks, my mannerisms. I fear for her every day. Will it come for her, too?

I still dance with it every night, exchanging pleasantries and compliments as it tries to lure me back into its comfortable embrace. I smile, let it think it has the upper hand, and as soon as it turns its back, I bash it over the skull and drag it into the closet to keep until morning.

The problem is, the next day, after breakfast, after I’ve dug the plot out in the flower bed and prepped the lye, the closet floor is bare. It’s always gone. Until night falls again, and it returns to ask for my hand again in that high-stakes dance.

Will she fall for its love like I had? Will she keep it, to have and to hold, until death do them part?

For now, I’ll keep watch, nudging her ever so slightly, guiding her ever so subtly, keeping my safe distance not to startle her closer to the black mouth of that cave, where her very own crutch awaits. I hope with all my heart that she won’t have to sweat through that lifelong waltz and never enters that cave from which, as the odds would have it, she may never emerge.