Determination (35 page)

The rest of dinner was filled with awkward silence.

“HEY Jamie, it’s good to see you,” Christian called across the small room with a wave as my father and I walked into the meeting. In the car, I’d tried to tell Dad he didn’t have to stay, but I was sure with my erratic behavior lately, he didn’t want to leave me to my own devices for too long. As Christian made his way toward us, I saw a familiar flash of dark brown hair and skinny, drawn shoulders pass me.

“Em, what are you doing here?” I asked in a hushed whisper.

Grabbing his arm, I pulled him to face me, and his eyes lit up.

“Hey, there you are. I thought for a few minutes I had the wrong place.” Em pulled me into a hug, and against the tender skin of my neck, he whispered, “You sounded shaky on the phone, and I wanted 226

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you to know that we’re all here.” I glanced around quickly to make sure Mike and Alex hadn’t come with Em, but it seemed to be just him.

“You don’t need to…,” I started, but he put one finger against my lips and muffled my words.

“I know I don’t need to, baby.” He took my hand and started to pull me to the chairs, but I squeezed his and held up a finger from my other hand.

“Hang on; I need to check in with my sponsor.” I looked around to see that Christian stood just a few feet away, watching us with a look of concern. “Em, why don’t you go find a seat with my dad, and I’ll be there in a minute?” My dad caught my eye over his shoulder and nodded. After a second, he herded Em over to the neat rows of folding chairs. “Hey, Christian.” I smiled as best as I could through the shock of Em showing up at one of my meetings. I mean, conceptually he knew I was an addict, but once the meeting started, he’d be face-to-face with it.

“Hi, Jamie, how are you doing?” Christian’s arms remained folded in front of his chest.

“I… I saw my ex the other day, and it hurt. I’ve been desperate to get high for days, but I haven’t done anything about it because I’m terrified of the effect it will have on my meds. Aside from Brian, my life has finally started to get better. I don’t want to lose it because I’m weak,” I confessed in one long breath.

“Is that Brian?” he asked nodding to where Em sat with my father.

“No, his name is Emilio. He’s a friend. He was there when I saw Brian and showed up to be supportive. It’s sweet, really,” I said with a glance at Em, who smiled at me.

“You are at the start of a long road, man. Right now, you need to be focused on you, and a relationship is going to get in the way of that,”

he cautioned.

“I’m so screwed up right now. I know he wants to date me, but I just can’t see a way that could happen. Brian is still there—all the time.

I’m also going to start school in a couple of weeks, and I can’t afford to get distracted. I keep telling myself all of those things, but what I really Determination

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want,” I whispered, “what I really want is to crawl into his arms and let him make it all go away—the pain, the fear, the self-hatred, all of it.”

“Have you started reading that book I gave you?” Christian’s voice had fallen to something softer, like he understood exactly what I felt.

“I did. I’m not sure I believe in the spinning disks of energy thing, but I liked how it gave me things to try to center myself. Some of the things make sense to me,” I admitted.

“I don’t believe that there are spinning disks of energy trapped in our bodies either,” he said with a laugh. “The point of the book is really to give you a map to finding peace, balance, and happiness.”

“Then why do you wear that pendant, if you don’t think that garnets will help you with your survival chakra, or whatever?”

“It’s an anchor, a reminder for when I’m scared or upset. When I want that hit so bad I can taste it, even after all this time, it’s something physical I can use to help ground and center me. I got it over at a new-age bookstore in the mall. It’s symbolic,” he explained quietly. “It’s something to believe in, Jamie. You need to find something to believe in, something other than your friend Brian.”

“Hey, Christian, it’s a quarter after—we should get started,” one of the members called over to us, and Christian checked his watch.

“We can talk more after, if you want, maybe go for coffee. My role is to make sure that you have all the resources that you need, and right now one of those resources is me. Don’t ever feel like you can’t call or text me. I’m your sponsor.” He gave my shoulder a quick pat and jogged up to the front of the room while I went to find my dad.

When I sat down between them, Em reached over and held my hand.

I just closed my eyes and let out a quiet sigh, trying to center myself before the meeting began.

GARNET, Ruby, and Obsidian are all focal stones for the root chakra,
which encompasses the energy related to survival. Wearing the color
red and focusing on your connection with the earth will help to keep
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the root chakra in balance. An imbalance in this chakra results in
feelings of insecurity and an inability to balance the higher chakras.

“You said it was garnet, ruby, and what, Jamie?” Alex asked as he looked through the different charms and necklaces on a small rack near the front of the store. The place was unlike anything I’d ever seen, with stones, crystals, incense, and hundreds of other little items sold to ward off demons, bad voodoo, or whatever else they claimed to do. If Christian didn’t believe it would help to calm and center me, I’d have handed him back the book and tried not to laugh while I did it. He had been clean for the last fifteen years, so obviously
something
worked for him.

“Obsidian,” I told him after checking the small notebook where I’d taken a few notes on chakras for our little shopping trip. The book said that without the first chakra in balance, I couldn’t find balance with the other six, so that’s the one I needed to work on first. I needed to find a way to stop feeling so scared all the time. Of course, there was no way to know if your chakra
was
actually in balance—you just
felt
that it was. That was helpful.

“Oh, hey, here’s a rack with all kinds of chakra necklaces and bracelets,” Alex said, and I could almost hear the
eureka
in his voice.

Already into new-age ideas and alternative healing, Alex was excited to bring me to the new-age bookstore to help me find some kind of anchor like Christian had. Not surprisingly, he already knew what bookstore I meant when I mentioned it. While he’d never looked specifically for chakra jewelry, he’d at least been there before, which was more than I could say.

“I think I want a necklace because a bracelet will make me crazy when I’m trying to type or write. I don’t even wear a watch because it used to rub against the desk while I did my homework.” I stood next to him and looked through the different options. The seven-stone chakra necklaces were nice, but I really wanted to focus on the first chakra. I found a nice silver chain that held a silver pendant with some kind of character on it with a red stone embedded in the center. “How about this one?” I asked Alex as I held it up to the light.

“Oh, I like that. I like this one too,” he said as he held up a pendant much like Christian’s with all seven stones set in a line. The Determination

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one Alex held had the stones braided into a thick silver rope held by a slender silver chain. I liked that one too.

“I think I’ll get both of them,” I said as I held them side by side.

Maybe I could switch off wearing them when I got that funny feeling in my root chakra. As we made our way to the counter to pay, my attention was drawn to a book on display about healing meditation. It claimed that certain medical conditions could be helped through meditation. Meditation might help stress-induced seizures, so I picked up the book and carried everything to the counter.

The unkempt woman behind the counter pulled her bandana higher on her head as she came over to ring me up. I couldn’t help but wonder if she was one of those people who didn’t believe in deodorant and such because a funky odor preceded her to the register. Pale, pasty bare arms shot out from under a hand-knitted shawl, and she punched in the prices for each object without looking for a tag. It seemed she had memorized everything in the store.

I handed her my debit card, and she offered me a few other chakra-related items I’d never heard of. Before she could slide the root necklace into a bag, I snatched it from the counter and put it on. As the stone rested against my skin, I didn’t feel any different. I waited for something magical to happen, my aura to glow bright against the cheap mall lighting, or whatever, but no supernatural force came to my aid.

Silently, I wondered if I could find that elusive balance of which Christian spoke.

SITTING cross-legged on my bed just a few hours later after Alex dropped me off, I read the first chapter of the meditation book, which outlined breathing meditations. Essentially, I just needed to sit in the middle of my bed, close my eyes, and focus on breathing. That sounded simple enough.

I laid the book on the bed next to me, rested my hands on my knees, and closed my eyes. The scent of freshly baked bread came through my window. A dog barked in the distance, a high-pitched, annoying sound, intermingled with the noise from the television my 230

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dad watched downstairs. My eyes opened infinitesimally to make sure that I was still alone in my bedroom. I felt like an idiot sitting there like a hippie waiting for a sign from God. Refocusing my energy, I closed my eyes tightly and shifted just a bit on the bed. The book slid sideways and came to rest against my leg, which distracted me from thinking about breathing. With a sigh, I grabbed the book and threw it onto the floor.

The air is coming in and going out, I can feel it tickling my nose, I
can’t think of anything else. I am balanced. I am at peace.

I sank lower into relaxation and lost the need to keep opening my eyes to see who might be watching. Taking another breath in, I blew it out slowly and tried to empty my mind of all the thoughts racing through it. School, Dad, Alex, drugs, Christian, fear, and doubt all slowly receded into the background leaving just one image—Brian.

Without any other distractions, I could see him so clearly a whimper escaped my chest from the pain. We were in our tree house, the tree house that had been so callously torn down. Low light from a nearby lantern illuminated his beautiful face. The image seemed so real I almost tried to reach out and touch his skin. I loved how his eyes held just a hint of humor along with the love I missed so badly. Slowly, he licked his full, sweet lips, and I ached with the need to kiss him. Tears slid uselessly down my face as I tortured myself with his image.

Still breathing slowly and concentrating only on the feeling of the air as it traveled though my nostrils and down into my lungs, the image of Brian began to fade. In some ways, I was sad to see it go, because Brian in our tree house, looking at me with such love, made me feel safe and happy even if it wasn’t real. That thought drifted away too, as I relaxed. I could no longer hear the television or the dog, only quiet tranquility.

I hadn’t quite reached that place of balance and peace, but I felt relaxed for the first time in years.

Determination

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Nineteen

“TODAY, we’re just going to run through the syllabus and discuss expectations for the course,” Mr. Stewart said from the front of the hall as I sat in my very first college lecture. I’d taken all my medication and meditated for about ten minutes before I left the house. I sat in the aisle seat at the bottom of the stairs to stay safe in case of a seizure. I had a tape recorder, pens, and paper. I was ready. When he started passing around a small stack of stapled papers, I switched on the tape recorder.

Because of the damage to my brain, I had some short-term memory problems, so I couldn’t rely on just listening to the lecture. I needed to take comprehensive notes and record the lectures to play back again while I studied.

“This freshman composition course is an introduction to writing on a collegiate level. You will have to write papers on subjects you can’t stand. You will write papers that you love. The point, especially for those of you in the creative writing option, is to start writing and keep writing. Now, over the coming weeks, we’ll start to cover topics like style guidelines, appropriate research sources, good organization and structure of a paper, and professional formatting techniques. You should have regular access to a computer, either at home or in the lab, with a standard word processor capable of footnotes and generic formatting.” He moved out from in front of the podium and fiddled with something at the large desk next to him. After a moment, the projector displayed a computer screen with the same document he’d handed out for the class. While I appreciated this thoroughness, we were in college—did he think we couldn’t read?

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It took the entire hour and twenty minutes, but Mr. Stewart walked us through the whole syllabus, line by line. My next class started in half an hour, so I packed up my bag and went out into the common area to get a soda. All the tables were taken, but a few empty chairs and benches lined a huge window overlooking the grounds. It was a beautiful view, and for a moment, I considered sitting outside instead.