Oh dear wonderful, trusting, friendly Diary, that’s exactly what I’ll do. I’ll spend the rest of my life helping people who are just like me! I feel so good and happy. I finally have something to do for the rest of my life. Wow! I’m through with drugs too. I’ve used the hard stuff only a few times and I don’t like it. I don’t like any of it. The uppers or the downers. I’m through with the whole mess. Absolutely and completely and forever, really I am.
I have just read the stuff I wrote in the last few weeks and I am being drowned in my own tears, suffocated, submerged, inundated, overpowered. They are a lie! A bitter, evil cursed lie! I could never have written things like that! I could never have done things like that! It was another person, someone else! It must have been! It had to be! Someone evil and foul and degenerate wrote in my book, took over my life. Yes, they did, they did! But even as I write I know I am telling even a bigger lie! Or am I? Has my mind been damaged? Was it really just a nightmare and it seems real? I think I’ve mixed up things which are true and things which are not. All of it couldn’t be true. I must be insane. I have lamented until I am dehydrated, but calling myself a wretched fool, a beggarly, worthless, miserable, paltry, mean, pitiful, unfortunate, woebegone, tormented, afflicted, shabby, disreputable, deplorable human being isn’t going to help me either. I have two choices; I must either commit suicide or try to rectify my life by helping others. That is the path I must take, for I cannot bring further disgrace and suffering upon my family. There is nothing more to say, dear Diary, except I love you, and I love life and I love God. Oh I do. I really do.
DIARY NUMBER TWO
What a wonderful time to start a new diary and a new life. It is spring. I am home again with my family. Gran and Gramps will be here for another reunion with the prodigal daughter. Tim and Alexandria are just themselves, and nothing could be better! I don’t remember who wrote “God is in His Heaven and all’s right with the world,” but that is exactly the way I feel.
Any one who has desperately needed to come home knows what a tremendous feeling it is to be lying in his own bed! My pillow! My mattress! My old silver hand mirror. It all seems so permanent, so old and new at the same time. But I wonder if I will ever feel completely new again. Or will I spend the rest of my life feeling like a walking disease????
When I go into counseling I’m really going to try to make kids see that getting into drugs simply isn’t worth the bull shit! Sure, it’s great and groovie going on trips, I will never be able to say it isn’t. It’s exciting and colorful and dangerous, but it isn’t worth it! It simply isn’t worth it! Every day for the rest of my life I shall dread weakening again and becoming something I simply do not want to be! I’ll have to fight it every day of my life and I hope God will help me.
I hope I haven’t ruined everyone’s life by coming home. I hope Tim and Alex wouldn’t be better off if I’d stayed away.
Today Tim and I took a long walk through the park. I talked to him honestly about drugs, after all he’s thirteen and knows kids who use pot at school. Of course I didn’t tell him the details about my past, but we did discuss the important things in life like religion and God and our parents and the future and the war and all the things that kids talk about when they’re stoned. It was different and really beautiful. Tim has such a clear, decent honorable outlook on life. I’m glad he’s my brother. I’m proud he’s my brother! I’m grateful that he will be seen with me. I’m sure it’s embarrassing to him, because everyone knows I was busted and that I ran away. Boy, have I ever messed up my life! Tim and I can communicate and he says he can pretty well bridge the gap with Mom and Dad. He is very tolerant about their position as parents and tries to see things from their point of view. He is really a very special person. I wonder how much of his mature outlook I am responsible for? I know he must have done a lot of thinking while I was missing and Mom and Dad were losing their minds with worry and fear and anxiety. Crap, what an idiot I have been.
Today Gran and Gramps arrived. We went to the airport to meet them and I cried like a big boob. They seem to have aged so much and I know I am responsible for much of it. Gramps is completely gray and Gran’s face is lined with deep furrows that weren’t there the last time I saw her. Could I have done all that in a month! In the car on the way home Gramps scratched my back like he used to do when I was a little girl and whispered to me that I had only to forgive myself. He’s such a nice man and I shall really try, although I know it won’t be easy. I must try to make them proud of me again.
I couldn’t sleep, so I got up and took a walk around the house. Alex’s mother cat just had a batch of baby kittens and I sat on the porch and just kept looking at them. It was a revelation! Without drugs! Without anything but kittens whose fur is like all the softness in the world put together. It was so soft that when I closed my eyes I wasn’t sure I was even touching it. I put the little gray one, named Happiness, up to my ear, and felt the warmth in her tiny body and listened to her incredible purring. Then she tried to nurse my ear and the feeling in me was so big I thought I was going to break wide open. It was better than a drug trip, a thousand times better, a million times, a trillion times. These things are real! The softness was not a hallucination; the sounds of the night, the cars swishing by, the crickets. I was really there. I heard it! I saw it and I felt it and that’s the way I want life to always be! And that’s the way it will be!
Today I went back to school and was called into the principal’s office immediately. He informed me that he had a record of my behavior and that I was a disgusting example of young American womanhood. Then he told me that I was thoroughly selfish, undisciplined and immature and that he would not tolerate any misbehavior on my part at all. Then he sent me to my classes like garbage thrown in a disposal. What a jerk!
If I ever had any doubts about going into psychiatric work and guidance work, I don’t have them now. Kids need understanding, listening, caring individuals. They need me! The coming generation needs me! And that poor stupid, idiot man who has probably run hundreds of kids out of school has given me a personal challenge. He may drive other kids away, but not me! I studied for four hours tonight and I’m going to study my stupid head off until I’m completely caught up. Even if it takes me seven or eight hours a night!
See ya.
Now that I have a goal I feel a lot stronger myself. In fact I’m feeling stronger every day. Maybe I can really resist drugs now, instead of just conning myself like I did before.
Dear Diary,
I don’t want to write this down because I really want to blot it out of my mind forever, but I’m so terrified that maybe if I tell you, it won’t seem so terrible. Oh Diary, please help me. I’m scared. I’m so scared that my hands are sticky and I’m actually shaking.
I guess I must have had a flashback because I was sitting on my bed planning my mother’s birthday, just thinking about what to get her and how to make it a surprise, when my mind got all mixed up. I can’t really explain it, but it seemed to be rolling backwards, like it was rolling in on itself, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. The room got smoky and I thought I was in a head shop. We were all standing around reading the ads for the second hand junk and for every kind of sex deal imaginable. And I started to laugh. I felt great! I was the highest person in the world and I was looking down at everyone and the whole world was in strange angles and shadows. Then suddenly it all changed into some kind of underground movie. It was slow and lazy and the lightening was really weird. Naked girls were dancing around, making love to statues. I remember one girl ran her tongue along a statue and he came alive and took her off into the high, blue grass. I couldn’t really see what was happening, but he was obviously putting it to her. I felt so sexy I wanted to break wide open and run after them. But the next thing I remember, I was back on the street, panhandling, and we were all shouting at the tourists, “Mighty kind of y’all. I hope you have a nice orgasm with your dog tonight.”