Playing with fire 08/05

My parents became drug addicts when I was about nine years old. After that, I became the adult to parents who could not, or would not, be adults anymore. My parents, too young to be hippies, too old to be excused for their teen-aged behaviors, tried just about every drug I can name. Each variety of drug abuse came with different sets of people. The faces changed, but they all had that look of being empty and then of being high. It was the same look my parents came to take on.

Some years later, teen-aged and tired of being the adult, I felt empty and displaced. I thought drugs would replace the emptiness with being high. And they did. But once the high was gone, the emptiness flooded back in, accompanied by shame and sorrow for a childhood that would never be.