The Lincoln Woods Trail

Addiction is like always reaching for the next thing. The next edge. The next high to get you away from yourself. I’d try to compare it to hiking but today I’m really not feeling it. Addiction is like never getting to the top. It’s like walking on a trail that never goes anywhere. Yet the hope that it will take you to some sort of utopia never subsides. Addiction doesn’t care what your drug of choice is. It only cares that you use something, anything, to try to get that edge you are looking for. The trail of addiction is a never-ending climb on a trail that looks really pretty and seems to promise a good view, except that the view never comes. You get glimpses of the open summits ahead of you, glimpses of the trees getting smaller and the sky getting closer, yet this reaching for something, anything that looks pretty, never amounts to anything. You reach and you reach, and you reach. But there is nothing to grab, nothing to hold onto. So, you reach for the next drug. Because at least this is something real you can hold onto, even if it is temporary. Because when you never get the view you are trying so hard to find, this drug must be the key to exploding you out of the woods and onto the rock ledges that expose you to the expansiveness of all the mountain ranges in the distance that someday you hope to climb.