"You think a junkie misses sobriety?"
I knocked on the bar. "Hello! There aren't any junkies anymore!"
He struck another cig. "But you know what a junkie _is_, right? Junkies
don't miss sobriety, because they don't remember how sharp everything
was, how the pain made the joy sweeter. We can't remember what it was
like to work to earn our keep; to worry that there might not be
_enough_, that we might get sick or get hit by a bus. We don't remember
what it was like to take chances, and we sure as shit don't remember
what it felt like to have them pay off."
He had a point. Here I was, only in my second or third adulthood, and
already ready to toss it all in and do something, _anything_, else. He
had a point -- but I wasn't about to admit it. "So you say. I say, I
take a chance when I strike up a conversation in a bar, when I fall in
love. . . And what about the deadheads? Two people I know, they just
went deadhead for ten thousand years! Tell me that's not taking a
chance!" Truth be told, almost everyone I'd known in my eighty-some
years were deadheading or jaunting or just _gone_.
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