Forever Right Now

Max chuckled and the sadness hanging over him lifted. By the time we’d finished our food, it had dissipated completely, and he was laughing again.

After dinner, we headed out to catch a cab for the Y, arm in arm. On Geary, near the diner, was an AMC movie theater. I sighed loudly.

Max looked down at me, in full sponsor mode again. “What’s that for?”

I nodded my chin at the theater. “Don’t you wish we could blow the meeting and go see a flick? Eat popcorn and forget everything for a little while?”

“Of course,” Max said. “But forgetting is the first step down the road toward relapse. You lull yourself into thinking the pain of addiction is asleep forever, then something wakes it up and you’re fucked.”

“I don’t get it,” I said as a cab pulled up. “Isn’t forgetting a good thing? Like, why do I want to relive the shitty past, instead of all the good stuff now?”

“Forgetting is pretending it never happened,” Max said. “You need to remember and remember and remember, until it has no power over you anymore. Someday, I’m going to walk up to that lamppost and all of the memories will still be there, but they’ll be a part of who I am. Instead of having a shitty day, I’ll smile and think of how it was a piece of my past, but not the sum of it.”

We climbed into the cab and on the entire ride to the YMCA, I tried to imagine my overdose at the New Year’s party as something I would ever smile about. Or how I’d tell someone—Sawyer, my heart whispered—what I was and it wouldn’t make me feel like curling up and dying inside for shame.

Impossible.

At the Y, we headed up the lamp-lit stairs with a thin crowd of people. I hunched deeper into my sweater and my hand curled around the dance troupe’s phone number in the pocket. Calling it sort of felt impossible, too.

Inside, the meeting began and I chose not to share that night. My brain was too full of thoughts and words and feelings; Max’s story and Sawyer’s compliment for me, all tangled together.

Afterward, Max and I walked out into a warmer-than-usual San Francisco night.

“You didn’t talk tonight,” he said.

I shrugged. “Didn’t feel like it.”

Silence.

I sighed. “I’m doing really good, Max. Working, paying rent…”

“Are you dancing?

“I’m still…limbering up.”

Max glanced down at me. “Lonely?”

I bit my lip. “Maybe. A little. But I sometimes wonder if that’s my default setting.”

He nodded, a soft smile on his lips. “The loneliness of the recovering addict. I get it. I have it too.” He jerked his thumb to the Y behind us. “You should talk about it in group.”

“I want to talk about it with you.”

“I’m here.”

I heaved a breath. “I used to think I was needy or clingy, the way I stuck like glue to the men in my life. But I just want to love someone. It’s so simple and yet feels so impossible at the same time. And yes, I know, I’m supposed to be focusing on me, but isn’t that the whole point of working on myself? To become worthy of love?”

“Everyone is worthy of love,” Max said. “But it starts with loving yourself first. That sounds like cheesy, clichéd shit, but it’s true. You have to know you can be good for someone else. Not just to fill up that hole in yourself, but to give.”

“I know, but it seems like, in the past, I’ve done all the giving. I’m the one who holds on and they don’t.”

“Are you holding on because you love them, or holding on because the alternative is being alone?”

I frowned, opened my mouth to speak, then shut it again. Finally, I huffed a sigh. “You’re wise in the way of life, O Max.”

“I know,” he said, puffing his chest out. “That’s why I’m the sponsor.”

I laughed and tucked my arm in his as he walked me to my bus stop.