You Wanna Know What Addiction Is (audio) (day 89)

They will tell you that addiction is learning to love the wrong thing. I think it’s learning to hate yourself and call it affection. We close the door and tell someone our darkest secrets or we don’t but either way, we fall asleep with our heads on our own pillows, walk the city streets with our minds in our own clouds. I wish I could stop for a martini. I wish I could let myself cry when things hurt instead of holding it in the back of my throat for fear of being found out for being something I don’t know how to explain.

I watch a man in a leather jacket as he lights his cigarette. I’d love a cigarette just now. Or a vacation. Or a deep delicious conversation over cappuccinos in the evening light of late spring. The pink glow of another time. Any kind of romance. Any kind of flirtation with a better self than mine. I watch my cheery young neighbor walk her dog. The wind shoves her long blonde hair into her beautiful mouth. I haven’t had sex in a very long time because I do not give a damn about most things I’m supposed to, it turns out. I used to say that buzzed and half smiling. I can tell you now I say it straight sober as fuck.

Addiction is believing love is exactly what they told you it would be and thinking you could ever find it. The trick is that love is not one bit the thing they promised you. It’s got a fuck lot more stamina. More grit, more teeth. It is a freedom they will tell you is sickness. I come home day after day with the same crushing ache. Not for sex or drugs or booze or whatever else people always reach for in movies. I just want to be able to write something honest. Something that even comes close to revealing this reckless need which throbs in my chest.

Please do not tell me it’s god. Please do not tell me about epiphanies or happiness or free webinars. I used to know a guy who could get every young girl at the office to sleep with him. He was married and handsome and had a lot of money and cars and fancy shit. Kids and a house and girlfriends and secret lives here and there all over the globe. Now he has cancer, too. He’s losing his hair and his teeth and pieces of his skull.

We don’t know what we love we just know we need. I’d kill for a glass of wine. For some random useless guy to flirt with me like I was too young and too pretty not to. Just so I could walk away. Just so I could slam the glass against the motherfucking wall. I hate that I could be so easily fooled. So easily distracted. I used to be able to drown out the confusion which swelled inside my stomach in waves. When I come home I just want to write until the walls cave in on me. I just want to get to the bottom of whatever this thing is in me that wants me down on my knees.