Lost in thought

              I’m doing that whole, ‘it’s not actually real’ thing again. That thing that makes you forget what you’ve been moved by and get back to your own life. I hate doing that. It makes me feel weak. I hate feeling weak, it’s probably one of my least favorite things in the whole world to feel. I hate feeling powerless too, although that’s what I feel like most of the time.
It’s weird I guess. I never used to feel powerless. It was always me in charge. Always me in control. Always me, the one who knew exactly what was going on, exactly where I needed to be. I knew exactly. The weirdest part is that I only lost my control because they tried to take it from me. If they’d only left me alone then maybe I wouldn’t have ever flipped out in the first place. That’s what started all of this though, isn’t it. That one time I flipped out. I screamed at yelled and tried to punish them all. I needed someone to blame.

            Luke says that pretending everything's not real is the best way to handle it really. I trust Luke. Not totally, of course. Not enough to last, or make much difference to me, but I trust him enough to listen. To talk. Lucky Luke.
I guess it’s because he’s kind of like me. I don’t really know how though, he just is. He wants to get better. He listens to the advice they give him. The crap they come out with. But I don’t. I think they’re thinking about sending me away from here. I don’t know about that. I know that I just want to go back to where I came from. I just want to sneak into the ponds through the back entrance where no one can see me. I want to walk around the edge to the corner and climb my tree. I want to lie on that branch that reaches out over the water. I want to hear the kids on day trips with their families laughing and fighting over food and drinks. I want to watch the fish swim around under the water. They always look so peaceful, fish. Just gliding on, through they’re lives. Benny was the only one who wondered about fish like I did.
Well he was the only one I ever bothered to tell how I felt, and so the only one that was ever given the chance to agree with me.

            Maybe it’s that tree. My tree. My beautiful tree that leans over the ponds, so I can watch those curious fish.
Maybe that tree knew how frightened I was of Benny even being there, so it let me talk to him.
I don’t know if he really listened, or if he wished I’d stop. Maybe he was just waiting for his chance to say something too.


          I don’t think I want to leave here. I don’t want to leave Luke. I like to think that he would be sad and alone without me. Miss me. My company. But I know that’s lying to myself. I know it’s me that would miss him. Luke’s weird like that I guess. It’s like he’s a combination of me and Benny and himself. But that sounds crazy. And I’m not crazy. Not yet anyway. Maybe I’ll get out of here before I’m off the drugs. That’s the thing with these centers, isn’t it? They only want you in here because you’re trying to give it up. But what if you don’t want to give it up. It’s the pain and the hope and horror and the desire that you never, ever want to let you. Letting go is not my thing. I learned that from Benny too. I learned so much from him, and now he’s not there to hear me anymore. He’s not there to explain what it is I’m really feeling. He’s not there to teach me about me.

                I told Luke today why I really think they might be sending me to the next one. I guess I’ve always known that I’m here for more than just getting the drugs out of my system. Getting them away so I don’t need them anymore. Of course I knew that. It wasn’t like I was on the streets, dying for a fix. It was just every now and again. No, the real reason I’m in here is Benny. And not just because he introduced me to drugs either, it was always my own choice. Benny would never purposefully do anything that might make me end up in here. Benny would never do something like that to me.
I thought he loved me too much, but maybe I was wrong. He should have known I’d be there for him if he’d only talk to me. But he didn’t, and I wasn’t. They might be sending me away because they think I don’t need help anymore.
Or it might be because they’ve run out of ideas for how to help me.

          I wonder if Luke will ever ask me about Benny. I might just tell him, you know?
Damn Luke and his stupid questions. Damn Benny and his hold on my life. I wonder what they all think the tree is about. They’ll never understand how much that tree means to me. Or meant to me. No matter how hard they try, how deep they probe, however the hell much they drug me up so I have to tell them all my soul, they’ll never understand that tree.
I only took Benny to that tree one time. Just one stupid little time. But he knew. He understood. Benny always understood me. It’s like we were one person. But we were so different. I thought I understood him too. Knowing Benny, he was trying to send me a message through that tree. He must have thought we were so in tune to each other that I would get it.
But I didn’t. I still don’t. Why the tree?

          I think they may have decreased my dose earlier this week. Luke thinks that means I’m getting better.
I told him it just means I don’t need the damn drugs anymore, and he said that was that point. But I told him that there was more wrong with me than being an addict.

              Luke doesn’t get it. He’s in his own world of drugs being the only problem and once you’re past that you’re home free. Yeah right. So maybe I’m getting over the drugs now. Maybe I’m not. Who knows? But even if I am, even if I do. I’ll still be screwed. Even if I get out of here tomorrow, nothing will really change. There’s nothing out there I want anymore. My parent’s will take me back in to be ‘safe’ with them, and then we’ll have all these big meetings so that my councilors can tell everyone how great I’m doing, and what an achievement this is. And my parents can beam around the room and tell me how proud they are of me. And somewhere deep in the back of their mind’s they’ll have this tiny little glimmer of something. Maybe hope. A tiny little glimmer of hope that they’re favorite little spoiled daughter will go back to her happy life at the rich school with her snobby friends. They all think that’s what I want, to go back into that live and pretend the last 7 months never happened. I know they say that pretending crap didn’t happen is bad for you, but that’s what they really want. But I don’t care if I am top of my class. I don’t care if I can go stay at my friend’s houses and get all the guys. I don’t care if people are proud of me. The only thing that I care about is Benny, and he won’t be there to see me walk out these doors one day. Just like he wasn’t there to see me walk in. Looking back on it, I wonder why they think that getting me off the drugs will even help at all.

              Luke asked me about the tree today. I told him I couldn’t tell him about the tree, because I didn’t understand it myself. He asked me what I did understand. "Angst", I said. I think he understood that, I think he knew. I think he just wanted more. Wanted something else before I left so that he wasn’t left there alone wondering. "Where’s Benny?"
He said it as if it were such a simple question, something that wouldn’t require much thought, like, "Do you want me to get anything from the store?" Something like that. I told him that I wished I knew, and he went quiet.
It was only then that I sort of realized that I’ve been refusing the drug withdrawal treatments for a reason. It’s because I don’t want to get off it, because I don’t want to get out of here. If I get out I’ll leave all these pretty trees that mean nothing behind. All these neat little trees that are all lined up. These trees that you feel guilty if you accidentally bump them or something. If I get out of here I might I have to face my own tree. I might have to face the memory that I keep locked away at the back of my mind. The thought of Benny... and the tree.

          They say the stupidest things to me in art class. I don’t get it at all. Here’s what they came up with yesterday, and I swear this is true, "It doesn’t matter what you do, or how you do and present it, as long as you convey the emotions that you, yourself have felt." Now to me, art is stupid. Art really gets me mad. It’s obvious that they only want us to do it in the hope that some of the crap we come up with will somehow be able to be analyzed and then they can really see what makes us tick. I hate art. Especially painting, and that’s their favorite one to throw at us. They go on about how painting is the easiest way to just ‘let ourselves go’, and put all the crap in our messed up little minds onto paper. As far as I’m concerned, painting is pointless. Writing solves itself.

              Luke said today when I was thinking about the tiny trees, that if I can’t explain to myself what the point of the tree is, or where Benny is, or why I need him so much right at this moment when he’s not here, then I should write it down instead. I think he just came up with that because he heard me say that writing solves itself. Still, you have to admit, it’s a pretty smart idea. I don’t think I’ll ever know why I need that tree. After all, it was a long ways away; I didn’t get to see it very often. But when I did, it was perfect, and when it was perfect I knew that it was because of the tree. The way things were. That’s why it was so perfect when I took Benny there.


          Benny was far from perfect. He wasn’t what my parents wanted for me. Hell, before I knew him I didn’t know he was what I wanted for me. But Benny was great, and I loved him. When I took him to the tree it made him perfect. I saw him leaning against its tough, strong trunk, waiting for me to come over so he could help me up into the higher branches. That was Benny, always looking out for me. The sunlight shone in these little ripples all across his face and smirked at me. Somehow I knew he knew just what I was thinking. I saw him there and I fell in love with every part of him all in that one second. My Benny. My tree. My perfect little world, just for that second.

            Luke says I need to talk to someone about Benny, because I obviously love him. I told Luke that I couldn’t because I can’t love someone who’s not there. But Luke wouldn’t listen, he just kept whining and whining. Eventually I told him that I couldn’t talk about it because I didn’t know.
He just told me that writing solves itself, and to write the damn thing down so he didn’t have to watch me gaze at the trees anymore. I told him these trees were boring and he didn’t know real trees. He said that was probably true, but he did know a lot of crap from before he got brought in, and he did know that if people don’t follow their own damn theories then they’re screwed for good. Then he walked away and left me there.
But it doesn’t matter when Luke leaves me alone, because I can always turn and watch him walking away, I never got to see Benny walk away.

        I remember wandering up to my tree that day. I think that something inside of me knew something was wrong, but I ignored it because nothing could be wrong when I was going to my tree, and when Benny was in the world. I remember a cute little kid with brown eyes grinning up at me when I walked past him, and I smiled at him and his parents and thought about how much I was looking forward to seeing Benny tomorrow. We were going to one of the carnivals on in town. We’d been planning it, and we were excited.
Well I knew I was anyway. Sometimes I wonder if I really did know something was wrong, or if I just thought I did, because it turned out something was wrong. Something was very, very wrong.
The first thing I saw was his blood. I remember that particularly. I know I had been walking along the edge of the scrubs, not looking at the tree yet, and then the sun shone through the leaves in just the right place at just the right moment and a flash of red caught my eye. Everything else all happened at once. I saw the blood. I saw my tree. I saw Benny and I screamed. I’ve never screamed so much in my life, and I never will again.
It wasn’t a scream of fear or panic. It wasn’t like a normal scream, the kind you hear on horror movies, or when people have a spider in their shower, it was a scream of pain and shock and realization. I guess it kind of sounded like something being strangled, a cat, or a possum maybe, but I don’t really know.


          I never saw his face. Maybe that was a good thing. He was lying next to the tree facing me, his neck tilted slightly to one side, his head flopping. I noticed that all the muscles in his legs and arms seemed to be tight and tensed. But his hands and fingers were relaxed. Like they’d done their last ever job. I noticed that the blood was still trickling out of his wrist onto the soft grass next to my tree.

                      Luke will always wonder about Benny. I think I’ve decided that I won’t tell him. It’s a nice thought that in Luke’s mind Benny is just some guy that ran off when he found out I was on drugs. At least I think that’s what he thinks. It’s strange really, cuz Benny was the one that got me on them in the first place. Kind of.
            But when you’re with Benny nothing else really matters. He lights up the room with his personality. He shines his way through everything. People always want to hate him because his clothes are torn and he’s ears are pierced in too many places, and he mocks things that they like, but they can’t hate him, no way.
He was always laughing. No matter what the hell was going on he was laughing. He made everyone else laugh too. I guess I kind of wanted to be like him. Free from everything, not listening to what everyone said, doing whatever I wanted. So cocky and confident that he could talk to anyone at anytime. Even that girl from the private school that caught his bus everyday except Thursdays. Me. If he’d never talked to me that day I wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t have taken drugs anyway. I wouldn’t have fallen in love with someone as crazy as Benny. I wouldn’t have watched him bleed under my tree. I still think about that sometimes. I wonder if the picture of him is blurring because my memory of seeing him there, dead and alone... lost, or because of the tears I had in my eyes.

          Luke thinks I’ll get out of here any day now. Maybe he’s right. I think I’ll go back to my tree. I think I’ll sit there and cry. I guess Luke’s lucky in a way, he doesn’t have to ever know what happens to me when I get out of here, and I swear I’ll get out of here soon. They’re all beaming at me like they’re proud, like they know something I don’t. And my parents came to see me. They looked older, but tougher. They looked like they were ready to bring me back.

                I know that I’ll have to sit where Benny sat. I still remember the exact way he was laying there. I wonder how long it will be once I’m out of here that I’m allowed to go out away from home or school.
As soon as I am I’ll go back to my tree. I’ll sit there like Benny did. I’ll sit there, leaning against my tree, until all the muscles in my legs and arms tighten up, and my hands and fingers are finally left to rest.
I’ll collapse there in the speckled sunlight and bleed for both of us.