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"I'd like to conclude today's group by asking each of you what you'll be most thankful for tomorrow," the woman leading the group asked the people seated around her.
Spencer reclined in his chair, groaning inwardly and crossing his arms over his chest, imagining this final topic of discussion a clever form of emotional torture devised expressly for him to endure.
The "tomorrow" to which she referred was Thanksgiving, which even in his happier years had always marked the beginning of a season he liked to describe with a wry smile by quoting The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, as "that tarnished tinsel time between Thanksgiving and Valentine's Days, when the season tastes as stale as a glass of day-old champagne with a cigarette butt floating in it."
He listened, half paying attention and half trying to come up with something, as other group members stated what they were grateful for.
What was he thankful for? His last remaining Armani suit, which he somehow miraculously still owned, with the ink stain he refused to have removed because it reminded him that ink came before pixel? His talent with words which had not deserted him even when it seemed the rest of the world had? He reached deeper. His morning coffee, cigarettes and the mantra of "Eat your fear"?
"Spencer?"
It was his turn. He'd been saved for last.
"I'm afraid I'm just going to have to parrot what everyone else has already said," he said. "I celebrate 90 days of continued sobriety at my Sunday A.A. meeting this weekend, so I am immensely thankful for my sobriety. And, I could not have achieved that milestone without the new lessons, habits, and recovery vocabulary that you all have taught me in these groups, so I am incredibly thankful for all of you in this treatment program. And ..."
He hesitated, afraid it might be too much, decided he didn't care, and added: "I am tremendously thankful that the seizure I suffered during the end of my relapse in August, right in front of the First Precinct on Varick Street, did not kill me.”
EIGHT DAYS LATER
"I just got off a plane at JFK," I punched into my iPhone as I walked out of the airport into the cold, New York dawn.
"WTF?" Charles responded. Of course he was awake. "Are you serious? How? Why? Why no advance notice?"
"Because there was no advance."
"That is so like you. You are fucking unreal. How long are you in Manhattan -- in other words, will you still be there when I get back? I'm secretly off the radar."
"Of course you are," I responded. "So am I."
Charles and I seem like twins. Which probably explains why we bickered like siblings when we tried to be lovers.
I boarded a plane to New York to love a man. When I deplaned in JFK, it was clear I had to leave a man. But as the cab cut through Queens and into Manhattan, my attention was immediately focused on finding a man. Not a lover, but one of my dearest friends.
THE SPACE BETWEEN
At the end of last summer, one of my dearest friends relapsed. I was home in Los Angeles when the issue came to a head. As the cityscape came closer, I remembered the lack of clarity of those days, the terrified conversations back and forth with a mutual contact in New York and my final decision to make my space.
It's hard to make that space when someone you love is in danger. It doesn't matter what the danger is, the immediate response is to rush to them, pick them up, take them away and find a way to make everything fine. That's friendship. No questions. By land, air or sea, one word and friends are there with a .45 and shovel.
But when it comes to self-destruction and abuse, you can't take that route. You can't make it fine. You can't not ask questions. You can't take a friend away from themselves. You have to let them hit rock bottom.
Would Spencer understand that? "Then stop wasting their time and turn yourself in." Those were my last words, so composed, they sounded cold. Would he forgive me those words and the deafening silence that followed after?
He didn't know I kept tabs on him. He didn't know I thought about him and worried about him. He didn't know I missed him and loved
