Farewell to an Addiction

It is a fountain you cannot extract wealth from, an oasis on exhibit only. This is what she concluded at the end of her reflection, at the end of such a lucid mental journey. But even now, as she was writing, she held the source of that oasis as central to the story she had to tell and the reasons and ways she was telling it. How she saw herself there, rocking on that chair with that blank stare, so in her and in the heart of the music, realizing music, movement, the twitching of her leg, chaos, and so many of these words mean the same thing, and how this vision would not be repeated for a while. It was a moment of deep awareness, the excited state of unobstructed contemplation, free from obscure rational mechanisms, that words never locked in securely. Most got lost even to memory, who could only recall sensations, and feeble echoes of a certainty that one had been “realizing and observing a bunch of things”. That is why she had to leave it. For a while.
And that is how she found herself there, curved wooden pipe in her mouth, on that delicious terrace, lost in the aroma of the music and the dim light from indoors, saying her long farewell to it. In all farewells one recollects the past events to recognize properly what one is saying farewell to, and just at that moment came to mind all that this act defined in the general narration of the past couple of months. Lost in a lover’s eyes, exhaling smoke; arriving with a sly half-smile to English class; staring red-eyed at the computer; hiding from the cops in the crowd in a far away city; she could go on. There were many moments of thinking: yes, I do this, and often, but it is only part of my life… at the same time, there was little life when it was irrelevant and a brief distance in time between these parts of her life. So it came to define: yes, life flying high was still life, there was still sobriety, obligations, other pleasures, people, activities, and it was only a change of state. She clasped the pipe recognizing that its taboo truly was a social oppression and strictly arbitrary in fact, but nonetheless real and nonetheless relevant. Even thought this held true, she also knew that it was arbitrary for her, too, as she saw that while it was still life it did make a difference as to what one’s life was, and more than it enveloping everything, it found its way into everything. So it would be hard. It would be hard to take this piece out, this tricky piece that shook her and she could not trust, that stole her, that took her to places it never properly explained, that made her doubt and made her far-away and steered her off the path into the dark woods even though her mother said stay on the trail, Little Red. She was so accustomed to it, she would now have to stay on the trail after learning that the problem with the dark forest was that you just never wanted to leave.
This is why she was saying goodbye, and the how to the why, with such force and poignancy. This year had been such a loud year, intentionally and unintentionally epic. Perhaps the age of three had been a similar kind of year, for its changes. In such a charged year, the dramatic end was definitive as the closing of a cycle, a time to open the eyes but also forget that the issue of calendars and new years is but man’s invention. So indeed she was closing a cycle taking a bold step forward: it was time. Time to prove and remember, check who she was after all without that, for one thing was talking about it only being a small part of one’s life and another caring to find out just how small. And time to prove, most importantly, that what she had assumed of herself since the age of three, and defended, was true: if she decided she was going to do something, she did it.
It made her sad how much it was hurting and how much she really did love it. How much it was a beacon in her increasingly solitary lifestyle. How she would probably get tense from so much uninterrupted reality after a while, but she would be firm, and probably wouldn’t even notice that tension because she would forget, but that tension would still be there.
Ah, time. Much would this teach her about the nature of time, that ever-burning enigma in her head. So she was saying goodbye: a torn goodbye to a mysterious dark love, one that’s like a true love –who sees you as you are when you’re alone –you one day realize you don’t understand and is mainly in your head. One you find it hard to leave. And in this case, it was a temporary goodbye, a letting go to give meaning to the being together. To make it better. To make it healthy. Probably in only that was it different for her, psychologically, than when at three she quit her pacifier, and threw it in the garbage can on her birthday with tears in her eyes, never to touch one again.