TODAY, FOR EXERCISE, we are at a public swimming pool. I cling to the ledge, my neck bent, so no one can see I am crying. I am crying simply because I actually feel the water. I’m too unused to feeling anything real—even as I know all feelings can appear to be backward.
For example, when I’m fully in the power of that addictwoman, when I am most sick, I am, ironically, totally capable of swimming, going to parties, socializing: being what appears to be normal. Yes, all these years I’ve convinced not only myself but also others that my behavior is normal because, in the strength of the addiction, I can seem normal.
Now, however, when the addiction is receding, when I’m in withdrawal, even though I’m getting better, everything scares me and I appear to be a wreck. Except I’m not. I’m in the process of becoming normal.
In this process I feel exposed, however. I feel as if Gabriel, Jill, Rick, all of them, have been strip-mined from my body. My addiction has been strip-mined from my body. Without it, I am now able to feel water, a synonym for life.
I’m also crying now because last night in the restaurant I couldn’t. Not that I was sad last night. Rather, confused and unsure. This world is beginning to look so sober, so different. I don’t know my place in it. I’m crying because I don’t want to leave the unit.
“What is it?” Linda says, swimming over to me. Her silky eyelashes are flecked with water.
I grip the ledge of the swimming pool. “Who am I, without it?” I whisper.
“You.”
“But I feel so…alone. That addict, you know, it’s always right there, first in line, in the front row.”
“I know you—well—understood Jill.” She pulls herself up until her elbows rest on the ledge. “But maybe, for starters, we can be friends.”
Yes, I think. Once I learn to care what happens to Linda, then I can care what happens to me. Once I see the real me, I can be with the real you.
Without my addict, I won’t be alone…just as Ted always told me. That is the point. It is with my addict I am alone.
“But like last night with Andrew,” I say, “that was so strange. I don’t even know if that was me in the restaurant. I was trying so hard to be perfect. The way I thought he’d want me to act—adult, normal. I mean, I wasn’t my addict. But I don’t know if it was me, either.”
“Ted would say that to be ‘you’ it’s just a matter of being emotionally honest about feelings. And not keeping secrets.”
I nod. “I’ve been keeping a secret since I entered rehab,” I say. “Can I show it to you when we get back to the unit?”
From the bottom of my suitcase I retrieve Forrest’s scarf and explain its significance to Linda, who sits on Jill’s old bed. I stand by the window and hold it up to the light. The edges are frayed, the material worn and thin in the middle, the section I once thought kept the nape of my neck warm and safe. I press it to my face. No autumn scent. If anything, it has a slightly antiseptic smell of the unit—as if it, too, needed to be here.
At one corner is a small moth hole. I poke my finger through, widening it. And wider still, until I have severed threads and the hole is about the size of a quarter.
My panic feels watery, just behind my knees, even with this small act of betrayal toward Forrest, toward the addiction. Yet when I return home I must also destroy the letters and mementos I save in the wood lavender box. I must rip the pages from the books of fiction. I must cut men’s faces from photographs.
But this is so scary. I comb the ripped threads of the scarf together as if I can stitch the hole shut.
No, I can’t stitch it shut. With my forefingers I tug the material harder. The hole widens. I tug harder still until I grip the edges in my fists. It rips. Forrest, you must go now. I don’t even know whether you’re still alive.
“I can’t leave here with it,” I say to Linda.
What is a ritual? Now I need a good sorcerer’s powers to combust the scarf.
“How about the dumpster?” She nods her head toward the window. Below is a delivery entrance to the hospital and beside it are two dumpsters.
I had envisioned setting the scarf on fire or cutting it into shreds. But the idea of the dumpster seems right. The scarf isn’t worth the purity of fire.
Linda and I go downstairs to the rear of the hospital. I toss the scarf into the dumpster while Linda claps her hands and cheers, as if I’ve just done something amazing.