6 months later…

You know something is wrong when the pain medicine begins to take on weight in your palm. 
When despite the screech of ache and ache, up your spine, through your mind, you find yourself hesitating at the sight of this medicine – your pain medication, your discomfort dispeller, this neural novocain, this sunday solicitor.
You eye the pills with a fluctuating mix of shame and acceptance. You juggle them around to buy some bullshit time before you concede to a relative truth and toss them down.
Your gut is uneasy. Not just because this synthetic opium is a molotov-cocktail thrown at a combustible problem, but because this bottle of pills that you have refilled every month is a mere hop, a skip, a jump away from poorly lit alleyways with guttered dreams and phantom candles flickering out.
You’re sick at the sight and you don’t need a mirror to see what’s under your nose; the stench of desperation gives it away every time you find yourself in a panic, because the ache is rising, unchecked, demanding, and your finding yourself lost without your pain medicine, without that be all, end all, answer all.
That’s where the line between what you will do to stop the rising wave of discomfort, and what you wont do to raise a barrier of numbness, is easily blurred into insignificance – just like scratching a line in the sand, you make a distinction, knowing the coming wave will wipe it away.
You no longer know who calls the shots. You are almost certain it is no longer yourself, but a question remains, a scenario, a picture in your mind, the all encompassing ache controlling your strings, guiding your hands to the pills, the pills controlling the ache’s strings, controlling you, controlling it, and on and on, a programmer’s loop into oblivion.
You find yourself in the absurd play of one being control—one being consoled by doctors convincing you that you are not an addict.
Everything is legit, the stacks of reports from past surgeries and prior hospitalizations are all reasons for taking their junk. You are not like the yucks on the streets, because they don’t have a reason like you, they don’t have an excuse that’s been documented, they’ve never been diagnosed, and if they have, they certainly aren’t under any medical help, not anymore…
For years you argue with them like a kid trying to grasp a simple truth against an adult’s abstractions. You fight even as you wonder why. You fight because you instinctively know that is who you are, what you do. You fight them, you fight the medicine, because you owe it all to the fight. Life, in one sweeping motion, is a fight to survive. Survival is a chance to love. And a chance to love is a chance to be free.
The pills they give you are nothing more than medicinal apathetics –extended release pacifiers. The ‘sweet release’ from the ache that you so desperately seek is more like the ‘letting go’ of all that’s cherished and known. You know you are stronger than waving a white flag and then swallowing it down. Your very life is a monument to countless battles won. Times you will never know, times you tried to forget, times you continue to brag about. You owe your all to the fight, to the push, that persistent, so close to nagging, drive that whispers, keep on keeping on, don’t stop driving you tenacious fool, burn like the furious flame that gives your spirit warmth.
You know something is wrong. Now fight, now right that wrong.  
 
-10-11-12-
-m.m-

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