The Lake Effect: Cognitive Therapy for the Recovering Addict 

Turns out, I’ve been rescued.

One second I’m contentedly bleeding on the side of the road, the next thing I know I’m propped up on crisp, white pillows looking out a window over a lake.  It’s really beautiful, too, littered with huge majestic cranes and little multi-colored ducks.  Fish occasionally jump around happily, albeit dangerously what with the cranes and all. The sunset turns the ripples every shade of orange I never knew existed, my limited world before was nothing but black and gray and red. It makes me sick.  I wanna drown myself in that stupid fucking lake so I don’t have to see it anymore.

Some “Good Samaritan” plucked me from my happy place in the dirt and took me to be taken care of.  I was too weak to protest, I suppose.  I mean, I couldn’t have even been conscious because I definitely would’ve put up a fuss. All of that devotion, my loving, pain-staking devotion to her. All those wounds, all the punctures and gashes, some haphazardly, half-heartedly stitched, some left ripe and raw, the marks and reminders I worked so hard to keep alive and bleeding so I’d have a little Imogene every now and again, everything perfectly bandaged and Neosporin’ed.  They were… healing, for Christ‘ sake. They were gauzed and taped so tight I couldn’t even root around for scabs to pick at. If ever I find this person, this, this “do-gooder”, I’m gonna fucking destroy them.

Imogene, my Imogene… why have you forsaken me?

I don’t know… maybe I left her.  Maybe I let this happen.

I’ll go hours without so much as thinking about her.  Just propped up eating Jell-O, watching the lake.  Thinking about stupid things like painting that sunset, or how maybe strawberry might be yummier than lime, or sometimes thinking nothing at all.  Just looking, watching.  Blinking.  Breathing. 

But sometimes, she’ll rip me from my sleep.  After the sun sets and the lake has gone dark and the shades have long been drawn I’ll wake up sweating and screaming, clawing at the tape-and-gauze armor that securely hides me from myself.  She’s in there.  She’s under there, trapped.  She’s in my skin, my skin is crawling.  It’s like she wants me to hate her.  That lascivious little pink tongue of hers that I used to write sonnets about lapping and dragging through my skin, driving me crazy.  I used to want to send her back down, through my flesh back into my bones so she could settle into my marrow and release into my blood and be free to possess me. But lately all I want is to get her out. It doesn’t hurt, it’s worse.  It’s such an absence of hurt, such a void of anything I can’t stand it.  It feels like nothing.  It makes me wanna tear the damn skin off and burn it, leave everything raw and exposed, open and waiting for her.

But she's gone. She’s gone, she’s gone, she’s gone.

And I don’t know how to get her back. 

Every time I start to scheme up ways I might have a little tiny reminder of Imogene, my Imogene, my beginning, my end, I wind up watching fish jump in the lake.


I'm not even sure where I am, but I gotta get out of here.