When I Don’t Go To My Recovery Meetings

When I Don’t Go To My Recovery Meetings

Most often I’ll dose the funk with two or three spoonfuls a day of meditative chanting and prayer, AA meetings and shares, to keep it at bay, but if that routine slows down…

…that dark sullen passenger sometimes just has a mind if it’s own, carrying around its heavy baggage like the homeless shuffle after being moved on by the police

Days will go by when I cannot see a soul, where the notion of phone call or text is communication with another realm, a paper tiger in an origami paranoiac sanitarium

The outside world, through the slits in the curtains, shouts and screams and laughs and luxuriates in irradiating mockery

Don’t they know? Can’t they comprehend my maudlin geometry?

Back to back episodes of familiar TV shows cocoon me in predictable, serialized safety, always knowing there’s another and another

Hunger vanishes and returns in pangs when I eat with the rapid panic and desperation of a prisoner whose meals are slid underneath doors on metal plates

Toilet trips are admissions of existence, I try to keep them few and far between, rushing to return to my fragile island of munchausen, my hypochondriacal hibernation, my hellish heaven of another day staved off

Responsibility’s coils evaded once more