Detox: Gulag Archipelago No Go
I spent nearly a year in an inpatient recovery facility. A mental hospital. A highly very social experience, with myself.
It was not solitary, not by far. Recovery, institutionalization is extremely chaotic, cliquey. Friends, friends, friendenemies, love affairs, nerds, cool kids, break ups, and hazing. It is like a cruise ship or summer camp. We promise to stay in touch. We don’t. Yoga retreat without the sage.
Bars on the windows. Meta traysl. No butter knives. Ripped, mildly inappropriate books in the communal library, Everything is communal, especially your mental health and neurosis. Like the novels, yellowed and torn. You swap makeup and pop magazines months out of date, a peddler’s economy.
It is an awful experience that teaches little by way of life skills nor sobriety. The best gift is that of context. Well, context and romance. Romance as that is when I met her and fell, hard. She is a funny bird, but God knows what I would do without her. A maniac and miracle.
Before internment, she and I shared a skin. Uncomfortable and taunt, then terribly too loose. Criminally so. We almost lost each other, foolishly in that way that you laugh so hard you break a glass and cut your hand. Take that x 800 + 4.
An emergency - as tends to how revolutions happen - landed us, cel mates, in gowns opened and billowing, nary a drip of lipstick in sight.
These days I think of how, all in the service of a Lock Down. I survived. The communal isolation made me better - not because it was good or just or right or necessary or even helpful but because I was there. I chose to be made better, not by it, but my me.
I chose a time of romance with the Witch that was and is me. The over-indulger, extender, reverser, and rascal. The best and worst of the times I had and have known. Detox indeed.
This is no soap box, and I am not some Maverick. I am human clawing for some context of internment. Why? Because I am miserable, for me and you and them. I am angry at it and them and we. I am eager to match sin to punishment, and Hell to redemption. To find the proper place for blame and extend it as such. To have the perfect excuse to get nothing done, not be accountable or responsible for behavior.
Fat chance. The wisdom I will offer from my previous experience in another kind of hull is that beyond death - this, too, is on our permanent record. Agency is yours alone, every retraction is painful, but surface. Transparent.
As the walls crowd in, our provisions and patience in short supply, recall how choice is in abundance. What has changed are only the options; as some reduce, more appear. New options/friendly strangers waiting to meet you - eager to be embraced. Open your DAMN arms!
Know too that you and your former manifestation - neither body is yet equipped to swim in these stranger new waters. This trial of learning together will be a Honeymoon. Trust, for it is towards romance I now steer the discourse. Woo that beautiful, beguiling you. No to nurturing or eye-rollable-selfcare, yes to Tete-a-tete. Wine, roses, long walks, Sinatra, and nuzzling.
Ask the questions of inspiration, lose track of time, see beauty in the creases, find freedom in the nudity of containment. Reframe safety as recreating. Forget your rent, and the best food on hand. Smell again for breath is in short supply.
The assignment to take to the dance floor for the first number of the night is this:
Think about what you are yet to indulge in that what is removed reveals? It is art making, budget exploration, clearing, researching? Learning?
Under the stone peaks the posey.
