on junkies

When I see the junkie at the gas station, while I'm dressed comfortably and freshly-showered, a little bit of my stomach sinks and starts fucking with my sense of well-being. An overwhelming sadness, with flecks of worry and fear. It's caused by the knowledge that a day in my life might come when I choose that path. Being a junkie doesn't just happen to people--they choose it, right? And I have those same choices to make in my own life.

I might be making them right now. My car needs gas, my rent is still unpaid, and I have this little itch in the back of my head. Yes, I want to get fucked up.

Oh God.

And then I think about God.

God, what soul would think of free will as a great gift to mankind? Perhaps, a soul who has never been among them, has not faced these choices every day, and instead sent his son to die at the hands of the junkies.

God begins to make no sense to me, though I'm not sure I really thought about it before. The junkie has "turned away from God", and as a kid, when I'd see a junkie, my mom told me that's why he was a junkie. Why?

I start to dissect the logic, and discover that there is none. And like most people, I do not have a clear grip on what God is. The Christians tell you that you aren't supposed to understand. God is a nebulous, celestial entity who created life, and gave the glorious burden of free will to humans alone. Not the cats, not the hamsters, but me. Me.

Perhaps God is a feeling that you get when a path is set in front of you, clear-cut, and you have no choice but to keep walking on it, and a large portion of the world accepts you and praises you for it. The pure kind of love that comes with security, acceptance, and peace of mind, often found in infants.

Perhaps Free Will is called a gift because that's the only way we can be happy about it at all.

Perhaps turning away from God is a feeling you get when you realize you can jump over the shrubs, scale the fence, get as far away from that path as you want to. Perhaps those "without god" know free will is not a gift, but a burden, because we have so many options. You could be a cabbie, rob a bank, breathe air atop Mount Fuji, or fall to your death. You realize you can do anything, and that there is no path.

Perhaps there is no God/Satan dialectic. Maybe it is the God/Free Will dialectic. The Set Path/Erratic Tumult.

The night after I saw the junkie at the gas station, the sinking churned my stomach into a restless, fruitless sleep, because all I thought about was how tomorrow's choices might land me begging in front of a gas station in five years, with my infected track marks and my decaying teeth. Of course I won't make those choices, I'm better than that, but there's no way to be sure.

All of a sudden, the road was littered with sinister pot-holes that I swore I'd never seen before. Maybe I'd just been overlooking them--is that how it starts? I wanted to go to my parents' house, my childhood home, my alma mater, with an urgency that I haven't felt since infancy, or what I imagined infancy felt like (Isn't it funny that we don't remember it? What God felt like?). I wanted to be coddled, to be told that I am a good person, and that I don't have it in me to end up like that.

But the thing is, I do have it in me. That's the God-damned truth.

And tomorrow, at any point, maybe sitting at a desk or in the middle of a phone call, that sinking shadow in my gut could crawl up into my stomach and start convulsing again, sprouting thick, scarred veins and a mugshot-worthy complexion. My safety net, hand-crafted out of questionable mythic materials, evaporated and I might be halfway to the bottom already. I'll hit the bottom before I realize there was never any safety net. I'm not any different from the Godless junkies.

Sometimes, I have these dreams. I'll be out with my friends at a bar, and we'll all be having fun. Then all of a sudden, I am a zombie. I cannot talk, walk, or function, and all I want is another of something. It doesn't matter what it is, the It is always variable. But I want it. Need it. After I turn into a zombie, I don't remember who I'm with or what is happening--only that I need another.

And I wake up so convinced that it happened, that I don't remember how it started. As if I blacked out. When I wake up from dreams like this, the sense of shame is almost unbearable. Sure, it was a dream. But in the back of my head, there's this itch.