Peter and I often swing our great blue door shut and engross ourselves in wild tales of drugs and raves before smartdrinks were kool-aid.
Peter thinks I am The Great Druggie Extraordinaire and is fond of exclaiming that there's no way he's done acid as many times as I have.
Fine.
So I go through the list of what, to me, are drugs I've been and done and tried and perhaps done again - but which are reasonable assumptions for a dedicated experimentalist to try.
Acid: 4 times
Mushrooms: Maybe 10
Weed, yeah well, okay
Hash, same story.
Crystal Meth? Maybe twice. (he beat me by one there)
Coke? once
Heroin? WHAT ARE YOU CRAZY?!? Well Peter, I found it a lot lighter than crystal meth...
Opium? Speedballs? Crack in da pipe?
Right around here, aside from boring old e and my personal all-time favourite but I'm afraid of getting addicted and I've hurt myself with it before: any amphetamine of any sort.
I am the amphetamine queeeeeen.
Anyway.
So towards the end of this list, I start running out of ideas, figuring, in my old, out of the loop, apparently conservative and generation-gapped mind that this is about it.
GHB he says.
Special K.
Rohypnol.
I start realizing just how serious the New And Improved Rave Scene really is.
I think it's cool, and good, and impressive that people are willing to push that far with themselves, and do the research and take care and and and.
We're NOT getting into my habitual discussion of how free society'd be if they all snapped like the first time you trip, really trip, on my best friend Lucy.
You start to think a bit different, is all.
Which of course, is what people like Uncle Sam or Uncle Bob or whoever think too.
Only of course, I think it's good because I'm afraid of becoming like them, and they think it's bad because they're afraid of the world changing to let me in.
But that's not my point either.
I went surfing.
I looked stuff up.
I read a poem by a 12 year old girl after her first acid trip, and how the world would never be the same again.
IF I'd heard it from an 18 year old, I would've been THRILLED to hear about her new freedom. And she wrote it so well.
But 12.
Eric's daughter is almost 12.
It would break her...
But then, I started at barely 14, and others earlier, so maybe Eric's daughter and her suburbly serene childhood is the kind of exception that will keep her clean until puberty does its own damage first.
I dunno.
Then I start reading about Rohypnol. Roche. Roofies. It's just a fucking sedative, right?
Right.
The Rape drug. Good for some awesome dreams too, I hear.
Then I feel my cheekbones hardening and my lips folding, transformer-like, into the kind of steel trap door that won't let anything in.
My mum was watching some show sometime last year, one of those TV movies about a whiny cheerleader who got drunk at a party and fucked some big guy and cried rape rape rape. So easy to turn cold shoulder to her unless you're the aspiring mother or neighbour of suburbanite inhuman whiny wenches.
This was different, and so this time I listened like I never should've not. Ever. The clinical description of what happens a half hour after ingestion of a spiked drink, how someone announces that he will escort you home and you wake up to finger your bruises with your mind screaming to rememeber where they came from.
How you wake up to wet spots and used condoms, and a sore belly, sore from the inside out.
How you look at yourself, this great body, all strength and muscle and fierce intelligence, that has withstood the battery of every teenage disaster until now, and someone, SOME STUPID FUCK, just reached up inside you, invaded you, and poked holes in the eggshell that you were so sure was steel siding.
The eggshell you, suddenly broken, suddenly spilled across a linoleum floor, with tears behind every flicker of your eyes, and your arms glued to your sides lest you tumble to pieces.
Invaded, Inside you
And I'm sitting here, just over 10 years later, remembering him with his sticky teenage breath and fat fingers and impossible weight, ungainly, uncomfortable, concentrating so hard he doesn't know he's breathing in your face, oh he's trying to fumble his way in, he's trying not to make noise and wake the counsellors, he looks at you every few minutes and slobbers on your neck to remind you that you're in this too, even if you stopped struggling in terror of waking the counsellors, fifteen, twenty minutes ago.
You're dead, you see. He's not poking holes in you, he's not tearing you open, slicing you to ribbons.
Nah. None of that matters, none of it is real, only the mind, the intellect is real...
And next year when you become drug slut and do favours for powder, when you flaunt how many times you've been to that spot or in that truck, none of it matters, it can't touch you, come near you, there are greater disasters in the world like being a stupid fucking yuppie suburbanite and not knowing the feel of the wind in your hair.
Beat me, beat me, I'm finally starting to feel something against my skin again. Make it harder, make it sting more... So I don't forget so soon.
So I'm sitting here, so many uncountable years later, I'm a child now so what was I then?
I'm slumped here, at my desk, at work, Peter in his powder blue sweater listening to something or other behind me, and I am sitting here, again, shuddering and shaking and pulling my cheekbones hard because it didn't hurt me then and it's not going to hurt me now.
But I couldn't feel then.
I'm never going to give up feeling what I've felt these past few years, but sometimes, sometimes...
I don't want to suddenly realize what it means when they say that they are torn inside, to realize that that stupid cheerleader and I have an occasional nightmare that is never, ever, going to leave us the invulnerable heroines we were when we were young.
Now, sometimes, when I collapse in your arms, crazy, strong, independent me... Sometimes I really need you to protect me, because I'm torn inside.
And I'm weak and frail and no matter how I throw my shoulders back I'm a woman with head bowed and sometimes I'm just broken.
But no, some of you out there will never see me broken,
and those of you that will...
...thank you for patching it up somehow so that I can throw my head back and laugh some more.
Last year, on December 6th, we were discussing violence against women, a topic I don't often indulge in when I've got child abuse to rail against.
Someone quoted a statistic "one in four women in Quebec have reported some form of sexual or physical abuse".
Someone else asked "yeah, but is that every year, or are they counting women that were raped ten years ago"?
It doesn't go away.
Ever.
And if it does, it's just swinging waaaaaaay out there, to come back and take you down with more momentum.
So I read this page somewhere, where some stupid airhead girl went to a stupid party to talk to some stupid guy, and then woke up in the mud, naked, and bruised, and with blood leaking out of her.
Some stupid waifish teenager and me, looked at ourselves in the morning, and realized we were broken.
Well, something had to bring us together, dinnit?