Philip Seymour Hoffman
Last summer I found a small box stashed away in my apartment, a box filled with enough Vicodin to kill me.
I would have sworn that I'd thrown it away years earlier, but apparently not.
I stared at the white pills blankly for a long while, I even took a picture of them, before (finally, definitely) throwing them away.
I'd been sober (again) for some years when I found that box, but every addict has one — a little box, metaphorical or actual — hidden away.
Before I flushed them I held them in my palm, marveling that at some point in the not-so-distant past it seemed a good idea to keep a stash of pills on hand.
For an emergency, I told myself. What kind of emergency? What if I needed a root canal on a Sunday night?
This little box would see me through until the dentist showed up for work the next morning.
Half my brain told me that, while the other half knew that looking into that box was akin to seeing a photograph of myself standing on the edge of a bridge, a bridge in the familiar dark neighborhood of my mind, that comfortable place where I could somehow believe that fuck it was an adequate response to life.
Nick Flynn, "Philip Seymour Hoffman" from My Feelings, 2015
Last summer I found a small box stashed away in my apartment, a box filled with enough Vicodin to kill me.
I would have sworn that I'd thrown it away years earlier, but apparently not.
I stared at the white pills blankly for a long while, I even took a picture of them, before (finally, definitely) throwing them away.
I'd been sober (again) for some years when I found that box, but every addict has one — a little box, metaphorical or actual — hidden away.
Before I flushed them I held them in my palm, marveling that at some point in the not-so-distant past it seemed a good idea to keep a stash of pills on hand.
For an emergency, I told myself. What kind of emergency? What if I needed a root canal on a Sunday night?
This little box would see me through until the dentist showed up for work the next morning.
Half my brain told me that, while the other half knew that looking into that box was akin to seeing a photograph of myself standing on the edge of a bridge, a bridge in the familiar dark neighborhood of my mind, that comfortable place where I could somehow believe that fuck it was an adequate response to life.
Nick Flynn, "Philip Seymour Hoffman" from My Feelings, 2015
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