RELAPSE

I guess when you have multiple addictions as I do...you're bound to have a relapse of at least one of these...in my case I have had relapses in practically all. I think I'm just weak. It's really not that I haven't tried to be stronger, more assertive, it's mostly that its habit to return to old ways and with my best friend having moments of weakness when I, in the decade I've know her, have never seen her weak, I fell too. Of course I'm not justifying this situation with her failings. I know this is my own fault.

A few days ago I had a relapse.

I went to Ryer.

I went back home.

I know it is only human to battle with inner demons and that sometimes you just lose. I lost. I can't blame it on alcohol. I can only blame it on love, on yearning, on comfort, on longing for something to make sense in my life. When I turned the corner into the block there was complete certainty. There are no always, no nevers, just sometimes, sort ofs and maybes--if I'm lucky. But Ryer, 2088, is certainty...and always home. I stood in front of the building and it was like the ruins of ancient Rome, Greece and Egypt; like pillars of hope, River-valley civilization of Mesopotamia where it all began and we still look to for inspiration and clarity. The burnt orange brick building like an archaic sunset, before pollution and industrialization made us forget the beauties of nature. It seemed far more immaculate that I had remembered it months ago. Why did it look so beautiful? I told the friend I was with I just wanted to go inside and I asked him, can I go inside? But it was 2am and it was just us two in the middle of urban wilderness, urban exotics, urban bliss. He forced me to keep walking, but my feet felt rooted into the asphalt. I am rooted there, and even when they cut me off; when I step foot on the streets that nurture me, I re-branch, re-root. I wanted to sit on the stoops all night like the old days, I even missed my cousins briefly. Momentarily I wondered what happened in between these few years that severed the branches that bound us together and why we couldn't re-root stronger than before? But if I would have stepped foot on the steps, I would have been a trespasser. I am not a trespasser. God, forgive us our trespasses and deliver us from evil amen...yes, deliver me from the confinements of purgatory. I am stuck in purgatory, the transitional space between my heaven and my hell, neither home nor gone. I'm still here, but I'm not home. So I ask to be helped, guided to a new place, a new home, if ever there is such a place than can exist as "home."

Truth, I cried all the way home. But that's usually what happens when i see 2088 and have been away for far too long. You can only get that overwhelming feeling when you have been away from home just for far too long. Distance makes the heart grow fonder, right?

The following day I passed by again...yeah...and this is producing a trend that needs to be halted before it runs rampant producing consequences that all that know me would urge me to stray away from. I don't want to lose myself in the black hole of nostalgia. But can you when the place you once knew is so different now? Memories can not be recreated, reenacted. They are static images that follow with you everywhere but ones you can never go back and relive. Things have changed, people come and go, it's never the same. It's just never the same.