A Junkie Named June Bug (17)

I am wearing a long, white faux fur coat when I enter my room at the facility in the middle of the night. Diana will later tell me that my emaciated frame, in combination with the coat, led her to believe I was an apparition mocking her bulimia nervosa. We will laugh wildly at this.

There is a purity inside this Philadelphia facility that radiates a beauty and grace that is utterly unparalleled. They're the most beautiful creatures I have ever seen, and my heart aches with a foreign yet overwhelming, overpowering, all encompassing love for them. These are my people. These are her people. This is our story.

These are my people that outside in the world I have to pass, and they have to pass me with a shared and understood acknowledgement of each other's brokenness that we're not allowed to speak of in the artificial outside world. Others, those out in the world, mistake our strength for weakness and their lack of empathy or understanding resign us to secrecy for fear of their judgement. Out there, when we see our own kind our souls connect and fuse together for a brief yet powerful instant where we are understood. We are seen for a moment in each other's eyes, and the pain, strength, and honesty is palpable without one exchanged word. It's the look exchanged between a mourning widow and the pallbearers carrying the casket filled with her husband's lifeless remains. Nothing is said, and everything is said and felt without a single word. Outside, in one instant while passing other survivors our souls tell each other a lifetime of secrets we have never been able to tell our closest confidants, and then in the next instant we're forced to release it so as not to make others uncomfortable with our brokenness. Those rules don't apply within these stucco plastered walls and we are free to delve into the neverending depths of truths we have been forced to stifle for our entire lives. Our souls will permanently fuse together in these minutes, hours, and days ahead to such an extent that we never have to speak again and we'll love each other till the day we die with a depth that our very own parents may not have loved us our entire lives. Certainly a depth in which my own parents have never loved me.

It is a state run facility in the heart of Philly, and it shows. The stucco walls, despite their reputation for sturdiness,are chipping and giving way to the decay behind their rough exterior. It is befitting as so are Diana and I, and all the other tortured souls unable to sustain the secrets inside that have begun to erode our tough artificial exteriors and divulge us now to tell the truth before we collapse entirely. Two small single beds a few feet from one another are adorned with tattered blankets that also like us, still work enough to carry out their primary and most basic function, but without care will soon be discarded forever as they will have no purpose to fulfill. They likely should have been discarded already, but someone here knows they are still useful and can one day hopefully be restored to all their previous glory. There's an old heater in our room that will simply stop working altogether many times during my stay, and Diana will find it hysterical when I call the orderly into our room expecting it to be fixed as though he's a concierge in a high class hotel that will surely be embarrassed about this snafu, and efficient in correcting the mishap. She finds it even more hilarious when I'm actually surprised he doesn't give a fuck.

It's a slightly larger prison cell with two, small metal framed single beds that we'll push together to fashion as a luxurious queen when we both need support during our near physical and emotional nervous breakdowns. It hasn't happened quite yet, but we already anticipate it's dreaded arrival. Within the first hour of meeting Diana, I love her more than I have ever loved anyone before, and few since. I will love her forever, and she is one of the only people in the world that I know will love me forever back. Our souls tell each other, and we both recognize this. Within an hour, our souls transcribe the words for our mouths to say so fast that we can barely keep up.

Diana is sitting on my single bed now, and it's dawn. We have a small window in front of us filled with beads of dewy perspiration that also temporarily reside upon the tiny emerald swords that live inside the ground, which lies beneath us on this second floor and whose scenery is being viewed through the cage connected to the window.

Diana is a heroin addict. She's thirty three, has two daughters who she's terribly ashamed to have disappointed, and she and I share the same birthday on September 27th, exactly nine years apart. She's Italian, and she also hates Jersey Shore but loves the Sopranos. Who doesn't, on both accounts? She's gorgeous in every way a person can be, and not just in the 'the inside is what counts' kind of way. But she is stunningly beautiful in that way too. I never knew love before her, but as soon as we meet, I know what love is, and that I instantly love her. I felt this way while growing my son, who I won't meet until nine years from now at Diana's age of thirty three, when I loved him, as I do now still and always, before I ever knew anything about who he was. This is how I immediately feel about Diana as even though I don't know her story yet, I know her, and my love for her is unfaltering and unconditional. Once she tells me her full story, the familiarity of it reminiscent to experiencing deja vu from a dream, it's as though I've known it and her my whole life and we are instantly kindred spirits.

Diana and I both are deeply insulted, ashamed, and torn regarding the indignity of the burden society has placed on us, and we can share it with one another finally for the first time in our lives. The world tells us to take responsibility for our addiction that we already know we are solely responsible for claiming in order to recover, but they don't understand the immense shame that accompanies taking responsibility for the abuse that led us to this wretched survival that they so casually, ruthlessly deem as our "choice". The world treats us as though we're worthless junkies destroying anyone and everything in our path to satisfy our own selfish fix. The fix we're actually looking for is the one that numbs the pain, because the world tells us we can't be broken, but we are and in a way that in part is irreparable. There is a hurt in our souls that will remain till our last breaths, and no one ever told us we are beautiful just the way we are. We're taught to fix what is broken, or it is worthless and holds no value, but we don't know where that leaves us as we are broken to some extents beyond any repair, and certainly above and beyond what this state run rehab facility has the capability, expertise, or even staff to fix even if we were 'fixable'.

Diana's fragile frame matches that of the rickety metal one her feet hang over while she rests upon my bed clasping my hands. Diana tells me about the memories she's trying to kill, and why she has so much trouble relinquishing control to 'a higher power', and it's because she's been told she had to do the same thing, and did, before every instance in which her priest raped her as a small child to a near adult.

Diana was raised in the Catholic Church where a priest is revered and regarded as the most pure and honest profession and path one can be blessed enough to follow. After all, holiness is next to Godliness, they say. Or at least that's what her parents said while in disbelief of what they perceived to be these evil sins that spewed from her molested mouth when she finally told them the truth. Every time she sticks a needle in her arm now she hopes, but doesn't pray, it will kill the memories of the look of shame, disappointment, and disbelief on her parents faces as she told them he'd been molesting her since she was seven years old.

She has her own daughters now, and while her own childhood demons may have temporarily disrupted her parenting, she can't understand how any parent can disbelieve their child's painful recollections. She doesn't understand it, but she does comprehend that her parents while simultaneously condemning her painful truths as lies, also blame her for the abuse they somewhere deep inside truly know to have occurred. That is a fact of which she is painfully aware. She tells me how it began, and how it abruptly ended.

Her parents work an exorbitant amount, and while they are by no means affluent, they make a comfortable living. They shuffle her off frequently into the holy predator's evil grasp. He grooms her with ice cream at first, and she's grateful that this powerful important man seems to love her in a way her father didn't, and certainly still now doesn't. He does this a few times, getting more familiar with her body with each passing fateful trip to the ice cream parlor across the street from she and her parent's church. This allots the all powerful one enough time to take advantage of her body in his chambers before her parents, blissfully unaware, return to pick her up. He tells her that if she wants to be close to God, he is the body she must pass through. He uses her faith against her to molest her in mind, body, and spirit. After the several trips to the parlor, he is confident he's groomed her enough that he begins now to take it further by cupping his hands, one of which is always dressed in a gaudy ring with religious affiliation, around her small prepubescent seven year old breasts. Or where breasts would be found on a woman old enough to understand this sexual foreplay and dance he has stolen her for as an unwilling partner who he'll torturously twirl around and with for the next eight years without permission or consent. He rapes and steals her childhood, her religion and relationship with God as well as her parents. Lastly, he'll take the life of her best friend, and any chance Diana has now to feel anything besides the needle in her arm before the welcome numbness it brings that removes her from the reality of what he's stolen from her.

She's angry with the notion of a higher power, rightfully so whether her perceptions are misguided or not. She's tired of people telling her these fucking phrases that they believe will allow her to let God in so he can lay his hands upon her and heal her, and they ring out almost as loud and screeching as nails on a chalkboard like the one inside his chambers when they say 'Let go and let God'. What right does God have in her life she wants to know, after he watched her be molested in his holy house for eight years, and then forever in her mind ever since. Those weren't God's hands all over her body healing her, they were the priests hurting her, and she won't make the same mistake of allowing her mentality to slip back into the one in which put her in the painful predicaments in the first place.