I’m out of sugar.

Yesterday morning I was out of coffee.  Out. I’m a little bit caffine dependant.  I managed to crawl to the quickie mart around the corner and got a coffee.  I went home and drank it.  Then I went back to sleep.  For most of the day.

This morning I have some lovely Italian roast coffee.  And no sugar.  And that’s fine.  If I were given a choice I’d take being out of sugar.

The reason that I have coffee this morning is that last night I went to the store that I have previously written about; the one with the “interesting” shoppers, and guess what happened?  I ran into an interesting shopper.  Perhaps “the” interesting shopper.

Brandt is the person who was always my in back into the world of crystal meth.  Both of my significant relapses started with seeking him out.  He’d always introduce me to one person and one person was all I needed to navigate my way back in to scene.  After I was the one who had the dope, and I always quickly became the one with the dope, Brandt would become a constant source of referral business. Every week or so I’d head over to his house with an 8 ball because I hated getting high alone.

I had a good reason to be there -bananas and coffee.  And I was spiritually fit haviing just come from a meeting, so I was polite.  We walked around the store a bit and talked. We stood in line and chatted.  We walked out of the store together.  We didn’t talk about drugs at all, but he did say that every month or so he hears from some mutual friend that they’ve had a “Chris sighting”.

We didn’t exchange phone numbers.  We didn’t even ask each other how we were doing.  One could tell just by looking at us.  He was pale and thin.  His eyes were red.  I was wearing a ball cap that reads “Betty Ford Center - Outpatient”.  The boundaries that protect my sobriety remained firmly in place.  Yet I had the thought as we were walking out of the store that I was in as dangerous a situation as I had been in in the last 19 months.

It is always suggested that we change playmates and playgrounds.  It is a great strategy, especially in early recovery, but the simple fact is that we live on a tiny planet.  Worlds colide. Shrot of joining the witness protection program, there may be no way of completely avoiding those places.  I’m just really lucky and realy glad that I’ve come as far as I have before I had to deal with it.