Perfectly put.

“Something has happened
To my understanding of existence
That now makes my heart always full of wonder
And kindness.”

—	Hafez “Today”

I decided to write about this, if only for the sake of my mental health. Part 1.

It was almost a month ago now, and I still randomly get upset about the ordeal. And where do I even begin? I don't know what amount of back story would instill enough emotion to feel compassion for this girl. I don't know if in all of this, I am the selfish one. I don't know if I've been duped by a dope head, just looking for the attention she always needed, and the money she could use to prolong her addiction a little longer.


It was a Friday night. Natalie called me in a panic. I hadn't spoken to her in a few days. Previously she had been squatting at my place with her boyfriend Hubert, but one day she took off for a "doctor appointment" and didn't come back. She cried on the phone to me that she had no where to go again, and asked if I'd buy her a bus ticket back to Milwaukee. Wanting her away from Chicago and the drug scene, I gave in. I expected her to arrive at my place about one a.m.. I went out that night to film for a horror movie project, leaving notes on the doors (since she had no cell phone) about making herself comfortable, and I went off to Matt's.

After falling asleep at Matt's, I made it back to my house around noon on Saturday. Immediately I noticed the Newport aroma-- Natalie was definitely here. And despite my earlier scoldings, she had smoked in the house. Oh well. She was fast asleep on the couch, and she surely looked like she needed it. I had never seen her in such a horrible condition. She had scratches and sores all over her face, a crater-like infection on the back of her hand, and her skin was ghostly white.

Then I noticed the bags. There were probably twenty tiny bags, shredded open, still lightly dusted in a white/tan powder. She didn't. She did not do all those drugs. I looked around frantically. On the coffee table, on a photo of a couple people I've never seen, she had piled a hefty mound of heroin.

Gah I was so angry. I let her into my home and she brings this shit, this vile, life-ruining, home-wrecking, mind-destroying substance. I left her to her dreams and got in the shower. I did not want to start my day like that, I could at least be clean first. I deeply regretted this, however, once I was fresh.

Natalie was face down in the mountain of H. She had organized lines and attempted to do them all in the 10 minutes I had been preoccupied. Now she was in a pool of her own snot, unconscious. I ripped her head up from the table and tried to look into her eyes. They rolled around in the sockets and then locked on mine.

"How much did you do?"

"not even that much"

"Like enough to kill a person?"

"no, i'm not fucking stupid."

"You should see yourself right now."

"why? what do I look like?"

"Seriously? You used to hide this shit from me. You're not doing this to me today. How much did you do?"

I went into the kitchen to start coffee and wet a rag. If she hadn't done that much, I'd just try to sober her up and let her mellow. At this point, I had some hope that I'd help her get clean. I thought, this would be the last of this. And if she doesn't like it, we'll check her into detox. When I came back into the living room, she was face down in the fluffy stuff again, snot and all. She had tried to do more.

"Oh fuck you. Pick up your goddamn head."

"whaaaa?"

"Let me wipe your nose. Do you want coffee?"

"yeaaa"

I let her slink into the couch. I picked up the photograph and moved it into the kitchen. There was still a decent amount left, but I had no idea how much she did. She couldn't form sentences anymore. Her nose was a goopy waterfall and she'd fall asleep halfway through a gulp of coffee, letting it dribble down her powder frosted Chicago sweatshirt and black leggings. I had no phone. No computer. I left it all at Matt's. Was this girl overdosing? I threw my shit together and ran three blocks to his house.

"I don't know what to do. Nat's at my house. She did a lot of drugs. I guess I don't really know what a lot of heroin is... any is too much. It looks like a lot."

"Should I get my car?" Matt spits out, but Tom interrupts, "Get your car, dude. We'll take her to the hospital."

(Part 2)

I'm aware that there's already a drug nicknamed "Soma;" however, if you ask me, MDMA is the soma Huxley was talking about.

ESPECIALLY with the news that the U.K. is experimenting with MDMA in patients with PTSD.

“There’s always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears-that’s what soma is.”
-Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

(I’m not making an opinion on the use of MDMA to aid PTSD patients— I think everyone has a right to be happy. I’m merely drawing parallels. I think Huxley was far beyond his time.)

And I continue to feel like I'm living in a dream.

I can’t read a damn train schedule. I fumble around the station with my things, rushing to make the 11 a.m. out of Chicago to Milwaukee, only to realize there isn’t an 11 a.m. In fact, there isn’t a train for two hours so it looks like I’m going to need to kill time. First instinct: get coffee. Second move: start reading in the most beautiful location in proximity—the Great Hall of Chicago’s Union Station. I decide to check my internet feed quickly when I notice that Natalie’s status from just moments ago announces her arrival in Chicago, so I call her. Not only are we in transit through the same city, but we’re both at Union Station. I run outside to find her getting her nicotine fix with her latest boy toy, so unfortunately named, Hubert. I almost don’t recognize her along the river walkway. She’s dressed the same as always, the latest rebel fashion, but she's thin, much thinner than Nat had ever been. Her hair looks great, a reddish brown, with natural waves and a swoop bang. I just can't get over how tiny she is.

 She’s been out of rehab for about a week now, and we’ve been in contact since. As of the 9^th, she’d been a month clean of dope. Within 2 minutes of me sitting beside her, she exchanges a few words over the phone. Key words—$20 bucks a bag, dubs, pick-up, good shit. I knew it. I should’ve fucking known better. In Chicago to see her Hubey?? It's more like a flock to the heroin epicenter of the U.S. because she can't lay off the dope. Most people don’t know this, but heroin has never been such a problem—it’s the new hip thing to do in the Chicago suburbs. It’s already taken lives around me, I had to watch a friend seizure over a Skype conversation from an overdose, and now, my best friend since our awkward middle school years, can’t get clean. I’ve never heard a heroin success story, and I know very few people who’ve made it out of addiction successfully. Do I begin disconnecting myself from the emotional attachment I have to her? Or do I become proactive? I want to expose this very serious problem for exactly what it is: a destroyer of families, friendships, a person’s happiness, and ultimately their life. If anything happened to Natalie, I’d absolutely die.

Now I sit and wait for the train. Maybe I’ll get another coffee. I don’t really have the stomach for food right now.

THIS THIS THIS

Our reason is quite satisfied in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of every thousand of us, if it can find a few arguments that will do to recite in case our credulity is criticised by some one else. Our faith is faith in some one else’s faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case. Our belief in truth itself, for instance, that there is a truth, and that our minds and it are made for each other,—what is it but a passionate affirmation of desire, in which our social system backs us up? We want to have a truth; we want to believe that our experiments and studies and discussions must put us in a continually better and better position towards it; and on this line we agree to fight out our thinking lives.

--William James (from The Will to Believe)

Drain City

Matt took me and T.J. into the ghetto last night. We all hopped out of the Lexus, stepped around to the trunk, took our backpacks out, put them on and strode down Capitol as if all in one motion.
Matt, looking serious as ever and staring straight ahead said, “On three, you’re following me over this wall. One, two… whoa shit that’s higher than I expected,” and yet, he still leaped over the concrete barrier.
I didn’t hesitate to follow him over, and T.J. immediately behind me. Instantly upon hitting the grassy riverbed, we heard sirens. Not one of us thought we were in trouble. We’re in the ghetto— the last of their worries should be a couple Upper East Side kids trespassing. And we we’re right. An ambulance pulled up right where we had jumped over. It seemed the perfect distraction; no one would notice the three of us slinking away into the Milwaukee drain system.

With boots on and lamps in hand, we quickly tagged and entered one of the 8 by 10 foot rectangle drains. After miles, we came across a knife here, some spoons there, a Walmart gift card, and some guy named Rashid’s driver’s license. It’s seemed this drain was a bummer; we hadn’t intersected with any others or found anything worthwhile. Matt flashed his bright light one last time before we turned around, and both Matt and T.J. let out an excited giggle (what we refer to as “geeking out”).

It was an intersection where three drains united. We chose the route down the 12-footer, and by this I mean a round pipe 12 feet in diameter. It wasn’t as big as the drain we refer to as “Pillar” but it was still breathtaking. Within minutes of walking we could hear the roar of another drain emptying into ours. Sure enough, a few pipes were emptying into the 12-footer and in one of the rarest, most “gnarly” forms.

It was a drop shaft, made entirely of brick, and at the very top near the manhole, it was cream city brick, the oldest in Milwaukee. We climbed the service ladder up into another drain about 10 feet above. We reached similar shafts 3 more times before the higher drains were too small to explore.

Of all events last night, the most exhilaration I experienced was from the tallest drop shaft we climbed. Heading back out, it’s like shimmying down next to a man-made waterfall. Ya know, the beauty of drains is that it’s always between 60 and 70 degrees. It doesn’t smell like some might think; in fact, for a stretch of drain I was overwhelmed with the scent of laundry detergent. And lastly, there’s no one around; at least, no one but whom you invite. And while you’re down there, you feel like the only people in the world.

It’s utter darkness, black nothingness, that we walk through and leave behind as we stroll with our lamps. It’s as if these places don’t exist until we decide to invade them.

I ought not glamorize this too much. It’d take away from the sanctuary it is if people began flocking to all the city’s drains at night. I’ll just make the safe bet that this doesn’t sound as nice to all of you as it does to me.

Go with the Flow

I've learned a lot during this first year of college. I don't necessarily mean in the classroom, because unfortunately I repeated a few high school courses, but I mean I've learned a lot about people.

I truly believe that there is a course to our lives, impossible to resist. And if we notice that life is getting too rough and there are too many obstacles, perhaps we're going the wrong way, and those difficulties are the universe's way of letting us know. For example, when I want something, not just kind of want it, but know that I must accomplish or have this thing, it  happens. I decide that it will happen, and all my actions fall into place. When I am misled or with "the wrong crowd" I can feel it in the pit of my stomach. I know that I am not meant to be somewhere or with someone. I don't know if this is the feeling of intuition, but I feel like it's much stronger than that, as if more like an invisible hand guiding me along. Don't get me wrong, this is by no means "God's hand" or some sort of divine path because I find that faith and reason are enemies, and I am most definitely on the side of reason.

Examples might better explain what I mean. When I first applied for housing at UWM, I was offered a place in the engineering living learning community by multiple advisors, but I thought about how a lot of my friends are reason-minded engineer types. I felt the need to escape that for a while, so I turned down the LLC. After just a week in  the dorm I chose to live in, RiverView, I knew it was too good to be true. My room was beautiful, the privacy wonderful, and the food mediocre, but the people were absolutely awful. There were few, if any, people like me around, and I felt like a snob in that place. I had no interest in being friends with any of those people just upon exchanging a smile or names. I made the best of my time there, but I was losing the little faith I had in humanity with each passing day. I became more and more of a hermit, staying up all night on the internet, and sleeping from 5am to 5pm. On occasion, I wouldn't see daylight. I felt sick, worn down and achy constantly. I worried that I was becoming depressed. It wasn't me, and I knew life shouldn't be that hard.

So I made a change. I made an appointment with my advisor, explaining to her that my grades were wonderful as always, but I felt my well-being deteriorating. I tried, without coming off as arrogant, to explain how the people in RiverView and I were not like-minded beings and that they were, in fact, dumb as hell. She was extremely sympathetic and knew exactly what I needed, and that was to move into the LLC. The mere idea of this sounded like an oasis in the dry desolate landscape that was my happiness.

The next day during chemistry, I mentioned to my friend Ryan that I was moving into the LLC, and to my surprise, he knew people who lived there already. Through these people, I was able to choose between a few possible rooms, and meet my new roommate. Everything flowed as if I didn't have to do a damn thing. One simple action of seeing my advisor and being upfront about how I felt, put me where I am today.

I live quite happily in the engineering LLC with a roommate who has become my friend. As a matter of fact, we get along so well, we're going to live together next year off campus. She thinks the way I do, and so does her boyfriend. We've introduced ideas to one another, discussed known philosophies and reinforced our collective atheism. I feel so at peace and in place. I attempted to resist the advisors in the beginning, only for the universe to direct me right back here.


Another good example comes from just two days ago. The story, however, will begin on the first day of my honors seminar last semester when I met Leopold Smith. He stopped me as I was walking out of Garland Hall to say that we should hang out. I took it as hitting on me, but I hadn't made any friends yet, so I agreed. Later he told me that he stopped me because I sounded smart in class, unlike the other girls, and he liked what I had to say. Anyway, we became close friends, and all of his friends became my close friends, one of them being my other roommate for next semester. Leo and I spoke recently about how my entire social life was based on him stopping me after that class, and he's absolutely right. Such a seemingly miniscule moment has had such an impact on my overall college experience.

And then, just earlier this week, a guy Jay from the dorms invited me to hang out at his buddy Nick's house. I hesitated because I had work to do, but something told me that I really ought to go. I had a good feeling about the energy of that night. Upon arriving at Nick's house, I realized that we were at my friend Byron's house-- because they're roommates! We laughed about the coincidence for some time, and proceeded to drink some coffee and watch a movie. And after a little while, others poured in to the apartment, all friends of mine and Leo's. It was in that instant I realized I was destined to meet these people, be friends with these people. This was the universe's fall back moment if I hadn't decided to hang out with Leo last semester. There's a comfort and camaraderie within this group that makes me feel so welcome and appreciated. It was no mistake that I met these folks.

What I'm discovering is that even though we feel that we have this freedom to do what we want, be who we want, in the end we search for what makes us happy. So if what we think we want ends up making us miserable, we will change what we want in order to find bliss. What I am trying to say is that there is a flow of energy that we can't fight, it may be down to the most finite quantum level which we don't understand, or maybe it's this so-called "soul" that embeds in our flesh, but either way, I say you should go with the flow; it hasn't yet steered me wrong.


Where I was going with this originally was a rant about how I have distanced myself from the negative energy of those who weren't meant to be my friends. They were left behind in RiverView, where they ask God to fix all that is wrong in their lives and continue to make poor decisions. May they find their right mind before it's too late to find their bliss.