LAND OF THE LIVING

                     I sometimes wonder what with all that has transpired in my life why the hell am I still around. I've given up on asking whether I am in some sick twisted spiritual joke or just plain insanity. I have come from a bottom that seems surreal and all together horrific to the outsider. For a child who was head over heels at the prospect of living happily ever after with a prince whom loved him and only him....(what a joke in the time of open relationships and a new unsafe sex upswing within our community). I was a old soul my Aunt Regina ( Reggie) would tell my mother and with that always remember my mom looking quizzical at the statement, myself I tend to agree. I am Miss Havisham forever waiting for that one man who like me believes in true monogamous love.
I am in the land of the living for quite sometime now, and it feels at times I am in a slow process of the realization my time has come and went on the chance at any happiness within the romance department.However with my venture back into the world of the living and especially attending college maybe it is a better than average chance it may happen.
I look at times in which I spent a weekend in the basement of a abandonminium with others doing unspeakable things while I kept that coppery scent of the crack pipe to my chaffed and bubbled lips, while in the corner was the makeshift toilet with a decrepit porta potty with a overloaded tray...I still hear the sloshing as I try and keep my self from the filth and putrid liquid. More people would join through this bacchanalian descent into a Alighieri nightmare of unspeakable carnal acts all for that chasing of that first high. 
The dusty,moldy and putrid smells have been replaced with the brightness of a college classroom filled with the most wonderful of society....people who yearn for a better life and those who teach us. It is a shock to my system as I hear compliments instead of the slurring of paranoid words from the shells of people I used to hang with and let degrade me. I have seen that I have put many on pedestals that are not made of marble but plywood (easily broken with truths). 
It's hard to admit to one's self that he has settled for less than when it comes to life's gifts...but it does make one ponder that life's rewards are vast and those who have suffered may reap the best in emotional and psychological rewards.
I am on the way as far as the beginning of picking my next college and definite major. I do think it will be addictions counseling with focus on sex addictions and a masters for Psychology for sexual abuse counseling....there are so many men in the rooms of recovery who are afraid to address the issue....I want to give back to a world that took so much but in this land of the living I want to save someone the pain I had endured for so long....isolation and degradation of the disease of addiction.