Eloi! Eloi!

It's... A sad story. Most sad stories, you think it would be night time, or raining.
But no, it was hot and bright. A typical midday in August. A warm late-summer breeze was pushing the first few dead leaves across the pavement. I had gone out for a walk to take my mind off of Chinese studies for a while.

I saw the woman sitting, slumped on the ground. Her shoulders were trembling, and at first I thought she was laughing, but I wish that were the case.

She was wearing ripped jeans, with suntouched red hair falling over her brown-skinned shoulders and piercings in her nose and lip. Her white tank top was stained with dirt and what could have been makeup.

And then I heard her crying... No, weeping. Such bitter weeping. She was sobbing as though every good thing had been taken from her, and every loving person had either died or deserted her. I barely heard her words through her heaving and retching, and through her tears I heard her wailing,

"ELOI!!! Eloi, lama sabachthani?!"

Her eyes were shut so tightly that I thought I saw blood stream from them, but her makeup was running down her face. She was pounding at the concrete with her fists until they were bloody, with her face towards the sky, asking again,

"Lama sabachthani?! ELOI!!!"

In her words I heard years of pain, I heard the crying of children and the buzz of locusts. She was screaming so loudly that a small trickle of dark blood slipped down her upper lip, staining her teeth.

No one around seemed to hear her-- Only me. I screamed, "This woman needs help! Somebody HELP!" But I couldn't move my feet, I couldn't look away. The cars kept driving, the shoppers kept rolling their red little carts to their cars and unpacking their groceries. No one noticed-- Or no one cared.

She continued to scream at the clouds until a young man walked up to her slowly. He was wearing jeans frayed and ripped at the knees, with a black beater shirt shiny with blood pouring from his nose. His palms were dripping blood, chapped and raw from rubbing against the streets and as he knelt down beside her he left deep red hand prints on his pants.

He whispered some inaudible phrases to her before he walked away, leaving a single round, black stone in front of her.

She took the stone and rubbed it in her blood-covered palms, whispering to herself before she erupted into another fugue of agony. Again the old words spouted from her lips, and I could only watch as my own tears began pouring. After too long I couldn't take it any more and I stumbled home, breathing too heavily the whole way.

I never knew what blade had pierced that woman, but I will never be able to forget the agony in her wailing. Hell itself could have pitied her.

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Ecstasy is Torment

I really don't like hard drugs. Now, before you go into the whole "Straight-edge" thing (a movement I dislike for other reasons), let me explain.

I really don't like hard drugs. I don't have an issue with cannabis because it doesn't really have any life-endangering elements to it. As far as I can tell, you have to be a complete bum with really nothing better to do with your time in order to let cannabis damage your life. I mean, by the time you've smoked enough weed in one sitting for it to become dangerous, you wouldn't have even gotten that far in the first place because you would have been distracted by the pizza guy or by the XBox. Stoners don't have the willpower or attention span to let leaf consume them. Which is fine with me. Weed isn't my thing, but so long as you aren't hurting anyone, go for it.

That being said, anything harder than that is an area that I have a lot of fear about. I've seen what kind of havoc cocaine, heroine, and ecstasy can wreak.

A lot of people ask me if that fear stems from any religious aspect. It's kind of like that... I suppose my Buddhist philosophy does influence that viewpoint. There is a parable in Buddhism about a monk who came across a woman who told him that he must either a) kill her goat b) sleep with her, or c) drink a mug of beer (all of which are against the vows taken by Buddhist monks).

He thought to himself, well, surely if I kill the goat, then I will be causing great suffering since a living being will die. If I sleep with the woman, I will have broken another great vow of a monk and will surely be lost to the ways of the world. Lastly, if I drink the beer then perhaps no great harm will come and I will only be intoxicated for a while, and most importantly I will only be hurting myself (this is significant because monks try to help others on the way to enlightenment).

So the monk drank the mug of beer and then he became very drunk. In his drunkenness he proceeded to kill the goat and sleep with the woman, breaking all three vows and, at least in his eyes, doing much harm in the world.

Now, I don't have anything against alcohol either so long as it's used with utmost care. The purpose of this parable is to illustrate that substances carry a grave danger of breaking all of one's vows. In a sense, we could say the intoxicant in the parable is the cause of all other harmful deeds. If we break our vows, we break a part of ourselves, we lose a part of ourselves, we kill a part of ourselves.

Not My Thing

A friend of mine hit me up one day.
She said, "Hey, I got some X I'm tryin to get rid of. You want some?"
I said, "No thanks, that's not my thing."
She asked me "Then what is your thing?"
Memories came back, and I went silent for a moment.
What is my thing? I know.
I wanted to hold the phone straight in front of my face,
And scream at it until I broke the microphone,
"You want to know what my thing is?
My thing is having a clear mind.
My thing is being able to tell what time of day it is, or what day it is, or FUCK, what my NAME is.
My thing is having a steady heartbeat,
My thing is being able to pass background checks,
My thing is being able to take a deep breath,
My thing is having friends with whom I can outlive the 27 Club,
My thing is putting my money and time toward something or someone that's valuable,
My thing is not losing my life because of a single pill, because of a line of dust, because of a needle,
My thing is keeping my soul and sanity and stamina!
My thing is saying I have friends who died a year, a month, a fucking week after I met them because of YOUR thing!"
But I took a deep breath.
"My thing is saying 'No thanks, that's not my thing'."

Substances such as cocaine, heroin, and ecstasy are incredibly addictive, consuming, and destructive. Many of their users who think they're "in control" are sadly mistaken. If you are struggling or know someone who is, call a doctor immediately, call (866) 558-9817 for addiction help or click here to find treatment facilities near you.
 

If you like my writing, you can join the site to the right of the page, like Speaking with Storms on Facebook or follow me on Twitter. If you have questions or just want to chat, I'm on Formspring, too!

Peace and Love, thank you for reading.