Elk in a Glade

Becca reminded me of an elk I saw once deep in the mountains. I paused and noticed it for a fleeting moment before the herd leapt forth gracefully and was gone. 

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I was a camera salesman at a failing photo shop when we met. She worked developing prints. At the time I had carefully & methodically conned a doctor to write me scripts to the powerful opiate, OxyContin. I carried the drug in many forms, from long acting tablets to instant release pills all in a backpack that included a kit to crush, cook and inject the drug intravenously. It was my lover. It was summer when I met Becca. She was a girl of mystic, faelian beauty out of another time, another world. 

I felt different in her presence and things began to change. My chemical lover was an imaginary relationship and she was real. When I shot the pills intravenously, I was an angel departing from a horrible world but now, there in that very world was something beautiful. I wanted to stay but I couldn't. The horror of withdrawals had become so severe, I no longer knew where hell ended & heaven began. 

My doctor retired, the scripts ended and I spiraled into a dark world, living out of my car by night and hunting street heroin by day, all the while trying to write a novel that could describe the place I felt I lived: A wilderness far below heaven, but not quite in hell. 

I arranged to check into a rehab clinic. The day before I left, I met her at a playground and we took a walk together. 

76 days later I came back and arranged to live in the unfinished basement of a multi-plex apartment building. It was dismal but I decorated it and did the best I could. 

Becca had bought flowers for me and one night we walked around the lake together. Finally she agreed to come over. 

The one thing I'll never admit except here as you read this is I don't seek satisfaction, gain or submission from women. What I seek is one moment with them. One fleeting moment where we're the only 2 people in this wilderness. It's a moment in time where the galloping herds and beasts of prey fade away to silence and its just us. The night Becca came over she gave that to me when we kissed. Whether she was prepared to give more, I'll never know. 

No one can ever take that moment away from me. In the years since, as I've laid in hospital beds or jail cell floors, I've gone back to that moment and no matter how far I am from heaven, or close to hell, I can remember it and feel like I did when I was a child, looking at elks in the glade.