The Voice Inside

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Even the sun did not rise with me this morning.

I was groggy again, as if i spent the entire night drinking. I wonder what's going on? My thoughts are all crud too. I'm losing my dear focus, my sense of outrage. This place is making me soft. While others of my folk, like my brother, are preparing for the onset of winter, I'm complaining about the cold of the dorm.

But shit! It is cold in this motherfucker. I mean it. They have the A/C cranked up to the max. I'm surprised that frost has not formed on the windows. But what beats me is the fact that so many of the chumps in here are walking about without shirts and sleep in their boxers. Now you know why I sleep fully dressed, sans shoes and socks, and the cold just gives me another reason for such.

But these idiots run about like the heat is blasting up in this party piece. I ask Paul the Stooge whats up with that, and he says: "I like it colder than I do hot. You can always put on clothes, but you can only take so much off." Nice assessment...for a jackass. Why I even talk to the man is beyond me. So, fully dressed mind you, I crawl into bed, drawing my limbs up into a fetal position and try to get warm enough to sleep.

And I still feel that this is making me soft.

I do my situps before leaving the bed now, and my push ups as soon as my feet hit the floor. The rest of my exercises can wait until after my morning piss. My eyes look red and tired in the mirror. It's as if they stayed up all night while the rest of me slept. I look out the window in the Dorm. It is still dark outside.

I walk to Think Coffee, at the crack of dawn. On my nice, leisurely stroll there I pass a man in a restaurant doorway, slightly hidden within its arch, seated upon a short flight of steps. He looked like a man once razed to the ground, as is rough sandpaper went against him. Weatherbeaten and haggard, he reached behind himself for a tall boy. A tall can of brew, half wrapped in a paperbag, and turned it up to his mouth, arching his head back. A stray left eye, not closing, spied my approach, and the bag vanished, the man bowing his head. Ashamed. I slowed as I reached him and smiled broadly.

Take your drink bud. A morning nightcap? Well then is it proper to call it a 'night' cap if it's happening in the morning? Shouldn't it be called a 'daycap'? Or more accurately, a 'morning cap'? I look back on the myriad times that I woke up drunk, angry at the world, angry at myself, and too bitter to face it all. I look back at the mornings where I searched for a bottle of Jack among a score of empties, for a shot, and finding one half full would turn it up to my hungering mouth. I know what it feels like to need that morning brace. That support that only inebriation brings.

I'm an old hand. I've known the feeling in the shelter of a home, on a couch, on a bed. I've known it in the streets, on a bench or on concrete. I do not judge you my brother, my smile is not mockery. If I had the money that I once did, I would give you a twenty so that you could buy several six packs and sit here and drink them up. Why?

Because I know EXACTLY what it's like to be you. To hurt so much inside that living life is insanity and insanity is living life. I'm not being paradoxical here I'm trying to explain this. It's hard when one knows sobriety, it's faint when one becomes a soberist. I'm not apologizing for me and I'm definitely not apologizing for him. But I know what it's like to sit on a stair step and drink this early in the morning.

He notices my smile, and smiles back weakly, his beard scraggly. The can appears at his side again, rises and returns to his face. I walk on, seeing more of a revelation than you might think. Where did I leave his path. At what turn off in the road did my thinking change? I've spent the better part of two years on the streets and I've weaned myself off the bottle. Largely because I could not afford the love affair. I had to learn to live without it. It was taken from me, forcing me to face each and every ugly day, to stare it in the face. The first few were horrible. I remember standing in front of the liquor stores before they would open, with what little money that I could find or scare up because I was too prideful to beg. I had nothing, not even a change of clothes. But I had three things that kept me going when the bottle could no more: the fibre of a broken being, the tattered remains of a life, and....

...my baby.

I could write away the pain. The drug use, the liquor. All of it.

I sit down at Think Coffee, in front of my baby, my laptop, and only one phrase comes to mind. Only one clear thought, pure and undiluted plays upon a tired brain, dulled by the lack of sleep, by the abuse of alcohol and drugs, pounded by needs. One thought comes quickly into focus, a deep terrible voice with much conviction, much malice inside of me:

Get to writing motherfucker.

My hands grace the keyboard, I begin to tickle their smoothness.

For the man that I passed outside, do me a favor, save a can of suds for me. I have to get to writing first.

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