On Being Alone

I had been on a drug binge for 2 weeks. I was fucked up and spun out and miserable. My head hurt; my eyes wouldn’t focus, and had repulsive bags under them. I hadn’t showered in days. I was a hot mess and ashamed of myself.
I looked around the room, still fractured by double vision. The garbage can was overflowing, with its lid propped up on a discarded milk carton like the top board of a grand piano. There were coffee grounds in a circle around the base from when I had knocked the filter a little too vigorously against the rim. Stacked around the sink was an abundance of dirty dishes, rinsed of any visible food residue, but not scrubbed clean. There were coffee stains on the kitchen counter, and all sorts of mess on the stove, under the grate next to the burners; rice long having dried, a bean or two, flecks of tomato sauce everywhere. None of this mess was recent. I hadn’t eaten a decent meal in over a week. All the chemicals made food unappetizing so I had been subsisting on coffee, Life cereal and weed.
My desk was covered with particles of weed, bits of stem and bits of shake. Rolling papers rippled in the breeze from the AC, and the water in my bong was yellow from overuse. My various medication bottles, which were usually so organized, were in a pile on the back left corner of the desk, next to my little Buddha statue that had been knocked over in a blackout. On the right was my copy of The Red and the Black, the cover dusted with white powders. There was still a line there. Which drug was it? When was the last time I had racked up? I was almost sick at the sight of it. My fucking head hurt.
The couch was barely assembled, cushions either upturned or on the floor. There were burn holes in the fabric from cigarettes in limp hands and there was a coffee stain running down the backrest. I didn’t remember spilling any coffee, and couldn’t imagine how I had spilled it on the backrest. All across the floor there were socks and boxers and t-shirts and pajama pants. I only saw one pair of jeans, indicating that I may not have been outside for days. Beer bottles were assembled in a distant corner. Cigarette ash decorated every flat surface. Books and papers were stacked on the dining table, next to my conspicuously open pocket knife. The scene was all too familiar. The only time I had done worse to my abode was when I had been crashing at my friends house in the Bronx. That was what had led to me going to rehab, now here I was again.
At some point I realized I was only wearing a shirt and bent to pick up a pair of boxers off the floor. I didn’t know whether they had been worn or not; and didn’t care. I stumbled down the hallway, keeping one hand on the wall for support. Holding the door frame, I swung myself around the corner into the bathroom where I was confronted by my reflection in a mirror. My pupils were still dilated; the whites were bloodshot. The purple flesh under my eyes sagged into pallid cheeks. My hair was greasy, pushed up into curls by fitful half-sleeps. I looked like a fucking psychopath.

I spent about 36 hours in that state, picking my splattered brains off the wall and reassembling them. I was hurting badly. My body hurt. My brain hurt. My soul hurt. I had spent two weeks covering up my loneliness with chemicals. All I had left was an empty, broken feeling. Everything was askew in the most unpleasant way. I yelled and punched the wall. I fell to the floor and cried. I even called my mom and confessed that I had relapsed. I was desperate for any type of soothing, any amount of human connection.

In another 36 hours I was on a train out of the city. I was still shaken. My head still hurt; but I was on my way to recovery. I was on my way to my old college to visit my girlfriend Ali, whose absence had left me to spiral as I had. She hadn’t broken up with me. She hadn’t even been gone that long; but when I had needed her presence she was imprisoned at school; and I hadn’t known enough about what I was feeling to do anything other than smother it. I hoped seeing her would help pull me out of the depressive cycle.
I also needed to get out of the city, get away from the scene of the crime. I wanted to be far away from those white powders on the cover of The Red and the Black, far away from the burn holes in the couch; far away from the mistakes I had made in the past two weeks, away from the concrete cavern that had hid me and my illicit activities.
I slept on the train, and each moment of rest worked to repair me. When I arrived, my friend Lee was waiting for me in his red VW Golf. I shivered in the wind. It was cold up in New England. The car was warm though, and Lee’s company was nice. I settled myself deep into the faux-leather seat and allowed myself to engage in some small talk. By the time we arrived at the school the sky was a grey, sad kind of dark. The air was cold and wet and dark. I wanted nothing more than to curl up in bed with Ali.
I received a warm welcome, but it was a while before I stopped feeling cold. Ali knew the full extent of my spiral; I wondered if she had confided in any of the others. They seemed to be treating me gingerly. Not one of them asked me “how have you been?” nor “what have you been up to.” Either they knew what had happened, or I’ve underestimated how much friendship makes time irrelevant.
Conversation was hard with my head still partially in the clouds. I sat in the corner in an egg shaped chair and closed my eyes, listening absently to my former classmates banter about their overabundance of homework. They implicitly agreed to let me be, seeming to know I’d emerge in my own time. Ali made a smoothie and brought me a cup. The sweetness gave me some life. I thanked her and kissed her but I still felt distant.
There was too much nothing in my head. My brain was restless and desperate for stimuli, but it was too tired to interpret it. It was like trying to tune a radio to the right frequency, but with the stations all out of range. Music could be heard for a moment here and there, but it kept being replaced by irritating static, and it was never the same song that came back on.

I woke up the next morning, too early to take any pleasure in the idea of a new day. The sun was shining grey through a monotone grey slab of cloud. The dew on the grass sparkled like snow. It was cold in Ali’s room. I pulled the blankets over my shoulders and hid my face from the light, pretending that more sleep was possible. I conceded defeat soon though and woke Ali up. We went downstairs to make coffee.
Ali’s roommates were awake soon enough, and we were all lounging in the living room, making bagels and chit-chatting, as the sun dissipated the clouds and shone to it’s full potential. The light through the windows pulled us into jovial consciousness. When we all had had bagels and our first cup of coffee, we refilled our mugs and went out to smoke cigarettes.
I was overwhelmed by light. The air was cold and crisp but the sun was so bright it gave the illusion of warmth. We followed a trail out into the woods, each clutching our mugs in both hands to keep warm. I could smell so much greenery that the city lacked, a smell I didn’t know I was missing until I smelled it. The smell was wet and fresh and sharp. It smelled like vitality. I looked up into the trees and watched the wind in the leaves. A residual hallucinatory effect made it looked like a canopy of flickering green static.
I sipped my coffee and took deep breaths of the country air. I found myself smiling in the sun. We all lit up our cigarettes simultaneously, then all took a sip of coffee. A blanket was laid out and we sat down crosslegged in a circle. It was mostly quiet except for the birds, and a few sparse words spoken to each other. For the most part we sat in silence and looked up at the sky.
I was finally waking up. I had finally come down. I was finally present in my body; aware that it was the vessel that carried my mind. I could hear the sounds and smell the smells and feel the feelings that I felt. My hands were cold. My left shoe was too tight. The clasp of my necklace was in the front. Ali was talking to Lee about snakes. Lee was responding with superfluous herpetological information. Jade and Jake were talking about eastern philosophy. Cary was smoking and staring blankly at the ground. I absorbed all of this through every one of my senses, not once thinking of what was to come next. I was content in that moment, in a way that drugs could never provide. I was in the good company of my loved ones.
 I took off my coat to expose my still sickly skin to the sun, got cold, put my coat back on and got warm. It was a nostalgic action that felt completely novel. I ran my fingers through the grass and reacted similarly, wondering how long it had been since I had done something so simple. I sat and smoked and talked about snakes, lit another cigarette and smoked that. When someone laughed I smiled reflexively. Being young, it felt like I had known them for so long. In that time everyone had become a caricature of themselves. We had grown so much and nothing had changed between us. Friendship had made time irrelevant.
In that moment I reconnected the last of my mooring lines, bonded to the Earth by my fellow inhabitants. I had been so wrapped up in being miserable, that I had lost sight of the cause of the misery. I had spent two weeks alone in my apartment chasing clouds, when all I had really wanted was company; and there I had it, in that little circle of coffee and cigarettes and voices and flannel shirts; and I remembered what it was like to be part of something.