Red Cedar

here is a photograph:

in this picture is our heroine – she is turning 19 in a haze of MDA (both ingested and smoked) and hard liquor. in two months one of the men in this photo will rape her, within five years the other man in the picture will die of a drug overdose. there is another photo too of another man (same party) – three years down the road he will rape and assault a friend of her so brutally that she is hospitalized. here is the danger she does not see – lurking in leather jackets, waiting for the right alleyway and the right girl.

before the night is out, our girl will come extremely close to having sex on the fire escape of this chinatown apartment, but it being february is too cold. she is not at all self-conscious about sex, she does it for fun and sometimes for drugs, or just to pass the time between parties. 13 years later she will recognize how lucky she was not to have got some incurable disease.

but now at 19, she never thinks of that even though she is officially an adult.

she is in a new house now, with different people – and working part time but still drinking a lot. there has been much illness over the winter, including a brief flirtation with scurvy and a full case of german measles. she is always sick, a typhoid mary of the punk rock set. her immune system has collapsed under the weight of drug and alcohol intake and she is so ill she at one point fears she has HIV because the sick never seems to vacate her body – but she is lucky, for the world does not want to write her out of the script just yet.

in this photograph, she looks like a woman with all the edge drained out of her, pale skin and the half-lidded eyes of the partially present. thin too, not skin and bones, but what you can’t see in the photo is that she lost 20 pounds in a month. also not visible are the bruises on her arms and legs, covered by clothing, mostly self-inflicted.

but this night is fun, she knows she will wake up ill, but the da takes the bitter out of the night wind and there is only a floating, a chemically-triggered inner peace. over the past few months, struggling with suicidal impulses, she has decided she doesn’t want to die just yet – things are just starting to seem better.