ALIVE AND FREE

I am alone among a thousand today...if you had asked me 20 years ago, would today of  been possible and would I be among this thousand sitting in this large cavernous room...No I would say ...No because, I am not among the squat conditions of a cramped mildewed basement sitting on a platform bed with a mattress so threadbare the springs are visible through the cloth...but I was just only what seems like yesterday. I would sit with my head held low so I would not have to look at the men square in the eye as I promised to do things for the next hit. My soul seems lighter today than it did then, it would weigh me down as I would lie on that mattress or many others like it, and feel that wince of pain as one of many would slide in just so I could feel that smoke in my throat and release me from a life of wanting what all of us expect...love, affection...I thirst for the human touch of someones arms embraced around me, but it was never an embrace but more like a wrestler's pinning that would force my face into the fetid mattress as I released the hope of ever recovering from this nightmare...I would never go back and yet I found myself in worse surroundings each time as I chased the coppery scent of death and I wished only for the release of the hold life had on me...Why had life been this cruel as I would waft in and out of my addiction like Miss Havisham seeking her suitor. Money could never attain that high anymore as I would try harder and harder each time for that high and it never was within my grasp anymore...I would sit on a subway car an watch thru the corner of my eye as a passenger would place a hand over their nose as I would sit down beside them. I thought I would look fine ,but what I saw stare back at me in the window which the tunnel would give off the reflection of a ghost; of what had been a son of a Mother whom only wanted the very best for her son.
I was among a thousand today and what was before me was a future that I never saw but in only through others and their successes ...God seemed to play vicious games with me and today I realize it was not a game but a process that made me stronger and the person a Mother dreamt her son to be. I walked among so many whom all had that dream, others had journeys similar, some harder, some easier; and we find ourselves walking across a stage with the call of our name and reaching for that dream that would only seem impossible so long ago. I am free from demons that hissed my names through the flick of a lighter and wafted through the basements and crackhouses of the dead neighborhoods of my hometown. I am free from the demons and I am among the living again...38 years after my life was abruptly changed on a crisp autumn morning and the casket closed on what any chance of a normal childhood was to be expected by the child I was...instead demons enclosed their wicked grasps upon a child's soul and squeezed until their seemed no hope for normalcy. I AM ALIVE AND I FEEL FREE FOR FIRST TIME IN MY LIFE...I AM GRATEFUL FOR THE CHANCE TO SHOW THE WORLD WHOM I REALLY AM.