Recently I heard from various sources that a couple of people I know are hell bent on destruction. I mean this to be taken literally; both are making such extreme and specific choices I am surveying my clothes to figure out what to wear to the next funeral.
These are people who make me laugh, who shine with a particular kind of seductive genius. These are people I’ve scraped off sidewalks, bailed out of jail, visited in psych wards, mailed cookies to when they found far-away jobs that were supposed to be some kind of new life. I’ve given vast amounts of time over the years in an effort to help them.
Eventually, because I was tired and needed to protect my own physical safety, I drifted away. Not because I stopped caring but because the combination of poverty, mental illness, and addiction is lethal. I knew that if I stuck around I was risking my own life.
My instinct is always to help people, render aid, start rescue operations. But I’ve done that for these friends, with no marked change. They have benefited from the vast efforts of a large community. They have been diagnosed, medicated, analyzed, rehabilitated, and in the end jailed. They have held down jobs, gone to school, traveled. Nothing has ever worked for more than a few months at a time.
I think that the underlying mental and physical disabilities might be things that can be treated, but in both of these lives addiction has such a strong hold nothing else sticks. Or the variety of addiction works at cross purposes with the need for certain prescription drugs. Or the legal drugs can never fully treat the profound level of damage. In at least one of the lives, it is also a clear choice. Even if she had never started using she would be suicidal. The drugs are simply the method she picked.
Right now I feel sad because I hate waste, and these people have wasted their youth. I am angry because I love them and they are leaving.
I wish that I knew the magical antidote to alienation and depression. I wish that I could mend the terrors of a lost childhood. I wish that I could force my friends to listen and understand that there is another life. I wish that I could make it true. I wish that I could follow, grab their hands, drag them back.
I wish that I could feel enough rage that this hopeless love would die.
But I’m left behind, sorting the facts, writing empty sentences, wishing.