I have a few fantasies left. One of them is that Angie, wherever she is, for once in her life gets very lucky. She is blessed with a savior, someone like Doc tried to be back in 2007. You never know, as long as she’s alive, if she reaches a point where she wants to turn her life around, where she starts to dream of what might have been, if she’d made a different turn in the road so long ago, there’s always a chance that this could happen. This is my fantasy:
Angie meets someone: A Very Good Person. That someone makes her see that she still has the power to save herself and turn her life around. So she starts to try. First, she gets clean. It was agony, but she does it. And the savior helps her stay clean by staying close by, offering support, and being her NA sponsor. Days go by, weeks. She gets a little job in a bookstore to pay back her savior for buying her food and to pay for her small, furnished room. She keeps her head above water. Weeks turn into months. She’s still just putting one foot in front of the other, going to her job, coming home and reading books. Even when she was a using junkie, living in my basement in Virginia, she loved to read books and do Sudoku puzzles. The months go by, and she notices the change in seasons. Summer is cooler this year; the fog never seems to leave the city. She and her savior start to go out a little, leave the city in her savior’s car. They go to Big Sur one weekend, do a lot of walking. Angie’s savior tells her all about her life and the lessons her own pain has taught her. Angie listens and thinks about that. She reminds Angie that life has been hard for her too, but one day she just woke up and determined to embrace it as a gift instead of a curse. And that’s when she started to be happy. Her savior asks her if she would ever want to go back to her life before drugs, to her family.
And then the miracle happens: Angie remembers.