I woke up this cold summer morning in the arms of a nightmare. The taste of last night’s crack cocaine still rancid in my mouth, the smoke drifting across the dust in the morning light, I was right there, right back where I used to be every morning in those endless years.

These days I know that the dream is just a dream. That the taste is a memory of lost highways and bad medicine. That loneliness has been the way of my life. But then again, I’m clean. It is another day to work  the spaces between the black keys of meeting my fate or the white ones of following my destiny.

And you? Where are you? I left you hanging on the phone after the last time you called me and asked for money to go to school. We both knew that two grand wasn’t for school. It was a coke buy and a short hard run into back to Hell.

I remembered taking all your garbage bag suitcases out to the front stoop, locking the door behind me, leaving town, going up river. A couple of days later  I left the state and then the country. After awhile, a long while, it was far enough to  get you out of my daily mind, my midnight terror.

Until this morning.

I loved you in my broken way. Recently I met someone and I think it might be a true thing, the real deal. I think you showed up last night to bless my escape, say goodbye, to let me let you go.

I hope you made it out,  that you never found the two grand, that you got off the highway. I hope that I never hear how that worked out, that I never see you again; not in the street, not in a store, not in the drift of an early morning or comin’ in soft on the night wind. Never. Not ever.

But sometimes I know you are around and it reminds me that there were unexpected moments of kindness and  fiercely sweet, an odd loyalty inside our unholy partnership, that we were danicng  a Devil’s two-step way past  the end of love.

Photograph by Michael Lebowitz ©2012