7. Hunter
7
HUNTER
Now
T he first thing I do after Rae speeds out of the parking lot of the cemetery is go to a meeting.
I was planning to go anyway since I’m the person who leads them, but after she walked away from me without saying anything other than my name, it felt like more of a necessity than a planned part of my monotonous life. Seeing her didn’t make me want to use, but it did send emotions rushing through me in a wave strong enough to knock me off of my feet and flat on my ass.
“The only frame of reference I have for it is being slammed onto the mat.” I laugh internally at my poor choice of a metaphor. No one else in my Tuesday meeting has fighting experience, so they don’t really get it. Still, a few people nod, encouraging me to share the way I try to do for them when I’m on the other side of this dynamic.
“It’s been over a decade since I’ve seen her, and now she has a kid…” I trail off, picturing the little girl whose face I only caught a glimpse of. She looks like Rae. I remember seeing pictures of her when she was a kid in the photo albums Will took great pride in showing me the first time they had me over for dinner after the relapse that brought her into my life.
“She’s a mom.” My voice shakes, and when I grip the edges of the podium, the wood creaks in protest. “I always thought I’d know her kid. I thought they’d be my kid, too. I didn’t realize how tightly I’d held on to that idea until I was slapped in the face with the truth, which is that that won’t ever happen. I won’t know her or anything about the life she’s built without me.”
But it hasn’t stopped me from picturing it. From building an image of the man who became everything we’d thought I’d be for her—guardian of her heart, keeper of her soul, father of her child. On the drive from the cemetery to the Baptist church where every NA meeting I’ve ever attended is held, I obsessed over it. What her life looks like. The peace she must have in her home now that she doesn’t have to worry about hidden stashes and bathroom overdoses. I don’t have to know the man she chose to know that’s the case because I know Rae.
She wouldn’t choose someone like me again. The lessons I taught her in disappointment have made sure of that. Which means the man she’s with now, the father of her child, the partner who gives her peace and protection, is my opposite in every way.
Where I brought complications, he brings simplicity.
Where I brought chaos, he brings stability.
The only thing he doesn’t have on me is love. No one in this world could ever love Rae more than I have, more than I still do. Of that much, I’m certain.
I blow out a harsh breath, knowing that my love for her is as irrelevant as my feelings about her being back here in New Haven. It’s all my shit to deal with, to sort through, to process so it doesn’t turn into an excuse for me to use.
“I guess we’ll add it to the long list of things my addiction has cost me.”
Out in the crowd, I see a few people nod their agreement. One of them is a kid in the last row chewing on his thumbnail. I’ve never seen him before, but that’s not necessarily a red flag for me. Every day is someone’s first day of sobriety, their first step toward a life without drugs, and when they make that decision, they usually end up in places like this, listening to people like me talk about the ups and downs on the road to sobriety. For that reason, I usually try to keep my shares on the lighter side. Not to sugarcoat things but to avoid being yet another person contributing to the shared weight we all carry when we leave this room.
That’s what meetings with my sponsor, Nate, are for.
I lift a hand, rubbing at my forehead as the realization that I’m treating this meeting like my own personal therapy session settles on my shoulders. Shame eats away at my gut, and I rack my brain for a way to end this without it being weird.
Turns out, when you’re in the middle of baring your soul to a room full of people, some of whom are the sponsees that depend on you to keep them grounded, there’s no real way to do that.
“All of that to say, even when you’re clean, there are still going to be moments like this. Moments when your past jumps out of the woodwork and reminds you of all the things your addiction has cost you, of all the ways you’ve been left behind. In those moments, you’ll ask yourself what the point is. You’ll think about giving up, but you can’t because it might be too late to fix the past but you still have an entire future to show up for.” Even though I’m not buying a single word that’s just come out of my mouth, I steel my gaze and meet the eye of every person in the room, saving the new kid for last. “For some of us, that future starts today. Right here, in this room, with these people who are determined to help you show up as your best self, and I gotta tell you, my friend, you couldn’t have picked a better place to be.”
There’s no applause when I leave the makeshift stage in the church basement, which is to be expected because this is a Narcotics Anonymous meeting, not an awards ceremony, but I’m still bothered by the silence. By the way, it settles around me when I take my seat at the back of the room, a collective but silent ‘what the fuck?’ from everyone in the room who won’t say it out loud.
“Who else wants to share?” I ask, stretching my legs out in front of me and crossing my arms over my chest to appear relaxed when I feel anything but. Thankfully, a short, blonde woman from the middle row on the other side of the room stands and takes the stage. Her name is Jess, and she’s been coming to these meetings since before I took them over. We’ve chatted a few times over the stale coffee in the back about how her addiction to opioids cost her custody of her children. Today, she shares about having an unsupervised visit with them for the first time in two years.
Once she’s done sharing, the meeting moves along as normal. Nearly everyone shares except the kid in the back. He stays glued to his seat, chewing his nail and bouncing his leg, even after we wrap up. When I sit down beside him, his shame and anxiety is palpable. It scents the air around us, triggering the part of me that knows exactly how it feels to be where he is right now.
“I’m Hunter.” I extend my hand to him, and he glances at it like I’ve just offered him a bomb, so I pull it back. “What’s your name?”
He pulls his finger out of his mouth and wipes it on his pant leg. “Taurin.”
“When’s the last time you used, Taurin?”
Bloodshot brown eyes flick between my face and the front of the room, and at first, I think he’s not going to answer me, but then he does. “Yesterday morning.”
I let out a low whistle that’s full of wonder. “First day is always the hardest.”
“I know.” Taurin curls in on himself, wrapping his long, thin arms around his stomach. He pins his chin to his chest and closes his eyes. “That’s why I can never make it through day two.”
“How many day ones have you had?”
“Five,” he whispers, his voice a tremor or pain.
Five. Five attempts at getting clean at such a young age. He can’t be any more than sixteen, and here he is, fighting demons I wasn’t able to get a handle on until I was more than half his age.
I place my elbows on my knees and clasp my fingers together, studying his defeated posture. “You want it to stick this time?”
Taurin nods. “I need it to.”
Something about the desperation in his tone resonates with the desperation inside of me. With that burning desire to be driven by something other than the need to have something you know will destroy you if you continue to hold on to it.
For Taurin, it’s his drug of choice.
For me, it’s Rae and all the things we lost when I stopped being able to hear my better angels because the voices of my demons got too loud.
I stand, and Taurin opens his eyes, watching to see if I’m going to stick around or abandon him like I’m sure so many people have before. I extend my hand again, and this time, he takes it, allowing me to help him out of his seat.
“Then we’ll make sure it does.”