False Talismans

Image credit: Photo by Alé on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons

I took myself out to lunch today. Nothing fancy, just a fast food place. I was appropriately decked out for the occasion in my classy mom gear: a battered old college sweatshirt. The man waiting on me looked, I thought, older than I am. He had thin sharp features and bright eyes, but his hair was grey and his face lined. His movements were quick and nervous.

"Did you go to school there?" he asked, pointing to my sweatshirt.

"Yes," I answered.

"I went to college near there," he said, naming a very well respected school, "I majored in History and I remember that, back in the 80's, your school and mine had two of the top history programs in the region. Our department was trying to court away a professor at your school."

"Yes, I was there in the 80's," I said, naming the year I graduated, "But I wasn't very familiar with the History department."

"Ah, I graduated the year before that," he said, then gestured apologetically at his uniform and the setting, "But then life... Things..." His voice trailed off awkwardly and he looked down.

"I know — believe me — I really do know."

I thanked him for my order, and he thanked me for listening, and I walked away with my food. I don't know what happened to that man, but like that little party game that the Junky's Wife plays, I filled in his story with what I knew: with addiction or mental illness, with a hard crash to bottom and a shaky attempt to stand again. Whatever it was, it wasn't (according to the lies he once told himself or the lies I once told myself) supposed to happen. He had a college degree from a good school. And that apologetic gesture around the fast food restaurant told me that kind of thing was supposed to have protected him from whatever catastrophe had made him fall so hard that he ended up working there, prematurely aged at forty.

As I ate my lunch, I started thinking about a friend of mine who went out drinking the night before a big event. I remember saying goodbye before I headed off to bed to rest up for the next day. My friend held up a bottle of water in a parting gesture: a talisman of hydration to ward off excessive drinking and hangovers. It didn't work, that talisman. It didn't ward off the vomiting or the blackout or the face bruised by a fall or the splitting headache the next day.

The fast food worker's college degree, like my friend's water bottle, was a false talisman. And my own life has been full of false talismans too, things I thought were going to keep me safe from pain and hardship, from addiction and codependency: my love for my husband and his for me, my intelligence and my own good college degree, my external successes, my husband's refusal to touch alcohol or drugs, my own abstinence from drugs and lack of interest in alcohol. In the end, none of those talismans worked because none of them could work. Things happened, life happened, addiction happened in spite of all that. Realizing that those things couldn't save me was part of my own crash down to bottom in my codependency. I couldn't prevent that fall, but I could get up and go to work: cleaning tables, filling the napkin racks, checking the drink dispenser, starting over.

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This post was originally published at The Second Road.