Opium is a charismatic lover who takes you to heaven, giving you years of warmth and affection, and then, like a schizophrenic, inexplicably and without warning begins putting you through hell. You are alarmed but, desperately wanting to recapture the happiness of the early times, you give opium another chance and then another—yet your lover becomes more and more abusive. Going back to the good old days is simply not possible. You give up and try to leave, but your lover threatens to kill you, beating you half to death just to drive the point home. Finally, and with much physical and mental anguish, you make your escape … but before long you miss your lover with a heart-searing desperation. Do you go back? Of course you do. Given the opportunity, nearly everyone does. Opium is a force.
And so my nineteenth-century addiction has a twenty-first-century conclusion: Edgy abstinence and comfortless sobriety. It is no accident that my story lacks closure. Such tidy modern notions are unknown to the former opium addict. Feelings resembling grief and nostalgia fill my waking hours, and many times Roxanna’s corpse has visited me in my dreams. She’s always eager to show me blueprints of a house that will be built with money that her son was awarded—the result of a wrongful death suit against the U.S. government. The Roxanna of my recurring dream is optimistic and doesn’t know that she is dead. Only I seem to notice that her skin is the very same pale blue that elderly ladies use to color their hair. Invariably I awaken from these dreams with an unvoiced sob burning in my throat and a desperate urge to fill my lungs with opium vapors. I am convinced that only upon my own death will this deviltry cease.
Yet despite all this, despite everything that has happened, I cannot despise opium. I have tried. It might be easier to stop longing for opium if only I could bring myself to loathe it—but I can’t. It is easier to hate myself for having lost the rare opportunity to ride the magic carpet; for having become careless and been obliged to jump off; for having allowed the magic carpet to fly away without me.
The majority of my collection is now in storage at the University of Idaho, but I’ve kept a couple of pieces that were once components of my personal layout. My old Yixing pipe bowl rests on my desk next to my computer, and now and then I pick it up and give it a sniff. Sometimes I imagine that I can hear the gentle burbling of vapors passing through its hollow interior. When the cravings get particularly keen, I tell myself that when health is lost to disease or old age, I will find a way to once again light the lamp, take up the pipe, and roll myself into sweet oblivion.