YOU'VE COME A LONG WAY BABY

I look back as I approach getting my associate's degree this Spring, and I wonder how the hell I got here. I think it started about a week before my Mother died in one of her late night oatmeal  conversations with me. I remember her saying to live my life and get away as far from my Father as I can....I told her I couldn't leave him and she was worried I would let him hold me back. I have in a way but its a fear of mine of being alone and I could not wish that on anyone, even the man who has chastised me for a lifetime. I now am looking at colleges to finish up my bachelor's and possibly master's in Psychology/Social Work/Addiction's counseling....I am eligible to attend school's I dreamed about when growing up....University of Pennsylvania, Cornell, Drexel, NYU....and the brochures keep pouring in thanks to my association with PTK honor society. It is a dream that has now become a possibility.
I look back at a time when I ventured so far down into my soul and saw nothing but the hell of addiction. It is a time when one is in his own prison that the light at the end of the tunnel seems to be the death at one's own hand. I remember the pewter pipe that left burns on my lips that I feigned ignorance when brought up to me at home. The look of a Mother who gave up on me so long ago as I would roam the house looking for those people who were following me in a drugged up paranoia.The destructive way I took at severing relationships with my Sister and her family. The look at my reflection in the subway cars window as I came home in a drug fueled depression that would send me into psych units across the county. I have come far from those things of not so long ago.
It seems so far and yet.....that fear.......that fear I felt in the crack house still cripples me with the possibility of achieving my dreams, you see it always goes with my life that the dream lasts a short wile and entices me only to have the dream disappear like the arctic ice in today's world.
Life is all around me and I observe.....it is so long since I participated that my social grace's are peppered with biting comments that cut like surgical steel....these comments are what keep's me from  getting hurt like I expect too.
I remember this journey to where I am now.....and I will say......"I've come a long way...baby"