autumnal blues

i'm late  getting started on this today.  i guess it's one of those days.  i have to start with this, because it's important to me, and to bring awareness to the need for this sacrificial journey that i'm on:  I can feel November encroaching on me.  just this morning, i became aware of a heaviness in my spirit.  it comes like that, like a fucking thief.  what IT is, i have to explain.

next month i'll be 27 years sober.  that means that in November of 1988 i used drug and alcohol abusively for the last time (thus far, God's grace).  now, that november was a very bad time.  it culminated in me standing in a garage on Gilbert St. in columbus, ohio, with an orange extension cord wrapped around my neck, standing on a joint compound bucket, praying for the strength to step off and die.  i had my shirt off, it was cold in that garage, though it was mild for a november.  i had spent months before that being hungry, being cold, being afraid and being constantly in need of more cocaine (crack) to smoke.  i had lost my car, traded it for dope and left it when it got impounded.  i had moved from my uncle's basement to the greenbriar projects by the airport in columbus because my uncle gave me the money to get my car from the impound and i spent it on coke, and i knew i was only going to  do worse things if i got the chance.  i wasn't washing.  i wasn't brushing my teeth.  i wasn't combing my hair or shaving.  i was a filthy, stinking, unwashed bum, a skid row carbon copy in a raggedy coat too big for me, a rope holding up my filthy pants, holes in my tennis shoes and voices in my head 24/7.  i was the reason there has to be a Step 2 in the 12 step program.  and it all ended with a cord around my neck.  the insanity was deep.  when, after four hours or so, i sat down on the bucket disgusted because i couldn't even die right, i looked up at the noose and saw my body hanging there, tongue lolled out, black with flies, eyes staring at the rafters in the garage, feet shredded to the visible bones from the dogs of the dude whose garage i was in, i broke down and wailed a storm of emotions i'd not been able to feel, that i'd finally become the monster they had made me feel like in grade school, in primary school.  i lost it.  and i walked across columbus to another friend's house, who wasn't at home, and i called my uncle and asked him if he could come get me, that i was done and needed help.

now, every year since then, especially in the beginning, the boundaries have sort of softened inside me.  i feel the walls that separate my yesterday and my today go malleable and porous and i start to feel the depression and despair that i felt in 1988.  i used to go under deep, to where i'd have to shut down, stay in bed, just try not to hurt myself.  but now, in light of the recent learnings, i wonder...
what's the real deal here?  why am i continuing, after 27 years almost, to get these phantom emotions?  i quit smoking cigarettes almost four years or so ago.  i no longer go through the nostalgic cravings for a cigarette.  i've not craved a hit of coke or weed since i was practically brand new in recovery.  i haven't craved a drink in almost as long, though admittedly alcohol is so prevalent that it is much easier to find myself thinking about drinking than any of my other addictions.  but, i feel the depression of november encroaching on me.  and i don't want it to.
i think it's another things manufactured by my adult consciousness, blamed on my inner child, or toti.  but, i wasn't a child when i went through my cocaine addiction.  not a small child, anyway.  i was a teenager when i started.  seventeen to twenty, those were my years of smoking coke.  not a child.  not ridiculed.  not made fun of.  just lost in the poisonous miasma of cocaine fantasies and rotting souls.  so, what can i do to change the framework on this time of the year?  i'm going to ponder that when i get back from my walk this afternoon, i suppose.