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You're thinking about swifts. How they can stay in flight for 10 months at a time, and do all the things birds need to survive. Eat little bugs. Sleep, with one half of their brains awake at a time. Coasting. This has been your last 10 months. Eating little bugs, half awake, half asleep. Coasting.
Swifts will only land to build nests and raise babies. The treatment center you are at, with its luscious viridescent plains, its firm mattresses, and calming psychiatric medications, feels, in a strange way, like a nest. But it is more so a wildlife rescue center. If a swift is found on the ground, a benevolent human should bring it to a wildlife center. This place is not a nest. You are not here to make babies. You are here to learn, in theory, how to fly again.
You wake early, before the hallway techs rap at your door to rouse you from your trazodone induced slumber, that is usually stippled with nightmares, flashbacks. Most of the nightmares are of using. Some of them are about being used. The past 10 months feels like a dream. One in which you were flying. Detox was the plummet—the moment, you fell through vast blue and crumpled, stubby legs and all, into a heap on a patch of withered dandelions.
But the benevolent human, in this case, was yourself. Nobody picked you up. Nobody forced you to be here. What happened was, somehow, through the thick haze of perpetual inebriation, you began to see the frivolity of your endeavors. Literary readings had long since lost their luster. Parties were perfunctory. And then there was the ever increasing emptiness of your now ex-lover. The more he drank, the more his calm intelligence and gentle, loving demeanor peeled away, like shrink wrap from an Amazon package. You sensed this. You saw the beat up box and didn't want to open it. Handle with care, it said. You had a feeling what was inside. And you knew there was a boxcutter right there, beside his Guinness bar key and sparse set of utensils in a kitchen drawer. You gave up on the box. Instead, in a particularly cataclysmic cocaine fueled fervor, you took the boxcutter to your own thighs, then, to your wrist.
The more insane you became, the more anger he expressed. It usurped what once presented as concern. Shame begets shame, you'd say. Please be gentle with me. Small, helpless swift. When the two of you met, exactly 10 months ago, you were both in flight. Together you snorted hundreds of key bumps, as a swift takes bugs into its small beak. You were so high. You remember the feeling of sun on your paper thin wings. Catching the bouquet at his friend's destination wedding in Georgia. The smell of the dried chamomile and lavender. Him picking you up and spinning you around, beaming. The Motel 6 he had booked two days before the flight. The bouquet now sits in a vase at your friend's decrepit apartment in Brooklyn, beside your copy of the keys to his apartment, and about a dozen empty vials.
You had to do this. You woke up. Miraculously, but you did. The note was scribbled, half in pen, half in barely legible Sharpie. I'm sorry. But it is too much. You remember the drunkenness. The last IPA of the night. The bag of cocaine, almost empty, but not quite polished off, sheepishly placed on your friend's dresser. There was a lot of blood. But you were alive.
You didn't want to be. You wanted a big lumbering bear to snatch you, the dying swift, into its jaws and finish you off. It would be easier. You didn't have a home in the sky anymore. You didn't have a home anywhere. Flight was impossible. Your life (if you could call it that) was lived hangover to hangover. The comedowns were unbearable. Anhedonia became your constant, interspersed with artificial, masturbatory bursts of pleasure. Your ex lover's hands had grown cold. His breath, sour. He didn't touch you often. He didn't seem to want to.
Your best friend, whom you once had thought your soulmate, had been dead for over a year. When you were a fledging swift, you attempted to build a nest with him. But the big lumbering bear had successfully snatched him, ground his bones to powder, and there they sat, in an urn you were not able, allowed, or felt stable enough to visit. He was 21.
You are now 23. You have been at the mental health and drug treatment center for a week now. You have been sober for 12 days. After group therapy sessions and arguing with your shrink, you wet your wings in the swimming hole past the rushing waterfall just about every day. Submerge yourself in the cold mountain water, stretch out on a fallen tree. Every day you yearn for the sky. But you will never fly again like you once did. Do they prescribe swifts mood stabilizers? Are swifts capable of making a full recovery? Do swifts mate for life?
The day before you left your lover, you asked him if he wanted to join you on a walk around the Ridgewood Reservoir. It was then, on that quiet, drizzly stroll, as you stooped to examine a flower you couldn't identify, he told you of the predicament of the swift. He pointed out a bird swooping over the reservoir that he assumed to be one. He wasn't sure if it was.
Later that night, after you had ended things and guzzled 4 gin sodas, you crumpled in a heap on Myrtle Avenue. A couple asked if you were ok. You said yes, please leave me alone. You went on to drink 4-10 (?) shots of tequila. Chewed up a 7-OH pill. Met up with friends. Then continued to imbibe with your friends. They told you it wasn't your fault. He's out of his mind, they said. He was. But you knew that you were, of course, partially responsible and also, out of your mind. You just happened to be the one with the courage to leave.
You are now lying on your stomach in the sprawling Poconos fecundity. A patch of the greenest grass you could ever imagine. It is pastoral, idyllic. NYC broils in your memory like a Giger painting, shades of grey, pornographic, and for lack of less pretentious descriptors—Kafkaesque. You languidly lift your eyes to gaze at a thunder storm gathering in the distance. The rain has not begun to fall. Thunder rumbles, a calming purr. Lighting bolts vein the clouds.
You wonder if your stomach will ever settle. It turns, pulses, cramps. You have been shitting liquid or not at all. Keeping food down is difficult. You are all appetite, but the only thing you want is a cold sip of Sauvignon Blanc. A shot of Jameson. White Claw Surge. A bump of pure white. No, no. Not quite. In this moment, you miss your ex lover more than the bottle. You dig your toes into the grass. You want just one more hit; a whiff of his sweat, a glimpse of his smile. But it cannot happen. Cravings come and go. You know he's doing better. He's sober and working a program. This gives you false hope. Like the "cocktails" you make yourself after groups and AA meetings. They consist of cranberry juice, ice, water, and lime. You finish a cigarette and put it out in the soil.
There are birds coasting in the gloaming, impervious to the impending storm. You wonder if they can sense when it will arrive, or know already that it won't. A feeding frenzy at dusk, when bugs are most active. Craning your neck for a glimpse of their quick, jittery ballet, you realize, then check Google for
confirmation, that they are, in fact, swifts. It is prime mating season. They are feasting or flirting. Perhaps both. "Flying cigars," is what Google AI says they are nicknamed. You light up another cigarette. You watch the swifts dart and glide. This is their natural state. You are sober. This is your natural state.
The storm eventually does come, and passes quickly. You avoid your rehab friends. They are kind, damaged people. A girl who is to be discharged tomorrow gives you some of her "Wellness Bucks" she's accumulated during her 5 month stay, which you can use to buy a fidget spinner or a journal. Some of the older men are watching a hockey game. The young adults are playing Just Dance in the way that
people on SSRI's do. You are not medicated enough to engage. You drink your magnesium supplement, pop your 25mg librium, 50mg trazodone, and abscond to your room.
Once you have roosted, you sit on your bed by the window. The lightning, now distant, is spectacular. Your room is cold. Your stomach settles enough for you to be somewhat comfortable.
Swifts nest in chimneys. You are covered in ash. Your eyes caked with soot liner. You grab a Burt's Bees face wipe and remove it. Crack open a La Croix, then your laptop. "Lone swifts, particularly those found on the ground or separated from their flock, are in critical danger and will inevitably die without professional help," said your Google search from earlier.
The trazodone kicks in. You dream again of baby blue vastness. Cold chimneys. Your flock, which has already migrated millions of miles away, probably out at Fine Time chugging $3 draft beer or doing blow in a bathroom stall. Swifts will be abandoned by their flock if they fall. Group survival supersedes the sick individual. They will migrate regardless.
You are a lone swift, no longer in critical danger. Your instinct to survive has not yet kicked in. You must accept you will never fly as you once did. But you will fly. It will take time. Time is all you have.
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