today I am coping with the loss of a friend who was in recovery. he was 26.
this isn’t the first time someone in group didn’t make it. when it happened before, a counselor came and told us a bunch of things I wrote down in my notebook and recite each day.
she said we may not want to feel what we’re feeling but that it’s really important not to push down our feelings, and that the pain is always better than the relief of getting loaded. I underlined the second part in red.
she talked about something called complicated grief. how losing someone could cloud our thinking but that it didn’t mean relapse was inevitable.
sometimes, she said, no matter how hard we try for someone and hope that they will get better in time, they never do, and when we lose someone in recovery the greatest thing we can do to honor their memory is to stay clean and help each other through it. I wrote that down, too, and underlined it in red.
it’s afternoon now and the sun’s beaming into the apartment.
I’m slackening off the strings of my guitar until there’s no tension left, and with wire cutters cutting through all the strings one at a time, down near the sound hole.
next I’m removing the tone pegs from the rear of the bridge where the string disappears into the body and unwinding the strings from the tuning pegs.
now I’m pushing the tone peg down into the hole, ensuring the groove is facing toward the headstock.
it’s the little things that seem to be saving me today.
cookie nieves 
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