Five years ago I came back to Puebla after living in Spain and made friends with a neighbor named Óscar who clearly needed help. He's a guy around my age with numerous mental ailments. From his emotional outbursts it's clear he has borderline personality disorder, his intelligence borderline retarded, he reported hearing voices and seeing his recently deceased mother, which made me suspect schizophrenia but it's difficult for me to tell. His mother, a woman of crude manners and loose morals, physically and emotionally abused him. She passed away from anorexia and left his thirty-something son to fend for himself with his two dogs. Water and electricity were cut off when payments failed and his home looked like a crack house.
Some neighbors would give him menial gardening jobs and errands and I would invite him over for dinner every day. He would complain endlessly about our neighbors and confabulate all sorts of senseless gossip (x and y are drug dealers, z is gay). He also had an inflated sense of ego, as if he was doing them a favor instead of the other way around. The daily dinners were conditioned to nothing because I knew the exchange would frustrate both him and myself, and over the course of a year I would see him grow chubby and improve his relationships through a sort of informal mentoring, though I made it clear I was not a teacher but a friend.
Then I went to Montreal to take care of my grandmother and my house was left vacant. Towards the end of my Montreal chapter he broke into my house and emptied every closet and every drawer in the house taking what was useful and it was an emotionally difficult job for my sister to clean up.
I was greatly disappointed and felt betrayed him, it caught me off-guard after his many unprompted promises of loyalty and brotherhood. Still, I came back willing to forgive if I saw regret and remorse. Instead, I came back to denial first, and when I asked to come into his house and finding all my stuff there he said he "missed me so much he had to go into my house to take his stuff". An acquaintance suggested a internment at a Christian substance abuse center, and even though that's not his main problem I thought it would do him good given his fertile imagination I thought there was a chance to convert the voices in his head into the words of Jesus and the bible.
I communicated with his family in Mexico City to propose this solution. They didn't know about the break-in and asked me to call a week later, then they said yes. They came to meet him and then they said no. I asked Óscar who was coy, I made the options clear: either you do this or we will never be friends again. He chose not to do it and with this came a sort of relief: I was freed of my duty of caring for Óscar.
In the inbetween times I've been to Puebla he's tried to amend ways, but from neighbors I know I've become one of those gay drug-dealers he always talked about (inevitably it was neighbors who tried to help him). I would say hello but excuse myself if he tried to converse, being courteous while avoiding any sort of meaningful exchange.
This time around I was ready to up the notch in our relationship. I've thought: if I ever come back to Puebla, I'll give him dinner every day again but we will not set a foot in my home. Part of the reason why he was comfortable breaking in was because it didn't feel unfamiliar for him to step inside. If I established clear boundaries I could help him without getting hurt myself, but we would never be friends again.
For this trip, my only intention was to chat with him a bit. He had been hired to redo a small park around the neighborhood and gathered stones from the contaminated river and did a great job decorating it. It has a naive yet aesthetic quality to it. It's clear he has developed some art in this (I regret not taking photos of his work for the reader), and I wanted to commend him in his work and encourage him to develop it.
But Óscar seemed to hide from me. He's usually on the street, running errands and such, but this time he was nowhere to be found. I asked my mother if he was still living in his dilapidated house. She said yes, he was probably avoiding me. I shrugged: that's on him. However, one day I was returning from the market with my mother and I had smoked a bit of weed beforehand. I distracted when a man passed between us. My mother turned around and said "that was Óscar". He was already 15 meters past and we were carrying a heavy load. "Not now" I thought.
The next day in the morning I had a terrible hangover and was packing for my flight with little time to spare. I smoke a bit to ease the hangover. This was very old weed I found next to my diaries. Before finding it, it had been a week without smoking, and I was feeling good about my run. I could feel continuity in my thought process and dreams were coming back. After finding the weed I could not resist and even though the first day was a wonderful experience, then I came into the familiar haze and disruption of narrative continuity.
In my hangover/haze I thought about Óscar. I know his thought process enough to know that he would never attribute my lack of greeting as a distraction. He would fester on this all the time I would be away. My lack of greeting was a simple distraction. A simple 10 minute visit to him would save himself years of emotional festering. I knew I had to go to his home and say farewell to him.
I walked to his house one block away and I whistled like in the old days. His remaining living dog started barking, and he came out quickly. I said "Óscar, I know we crossed paths yesterday and I didn't say hello. I was not my intention, I was completely distracted. You know... I want to have a cordial relationship with you even though we can't be friends anymore. I'm grabbing a flight very soon and I wanted to clear this up with you before I left. You are not my enemy and I don't want you to think I hate you".
He said "I've thought very long about what I did and now I know why did it. I wanted to protect you from drugs" I started to protest but be asked me to finish. It's impossible for me to repeat verbatim what was said, he looked at me opening his eyes as wide as plates while pressing his index finger into my chest, lecturing me on why drugs are evil, that if I continue doing what I'm doing I'll lose everything I've built for myself, and that he wants to see me get married and have kids and lead a happy and virtuous life. While he was speaking I was thinking "listen to him, God speaks through all of us, take what is useful and reject what is not". At the end of his lecture we embraced and wished each other good luck.
My friend in Cancún had told me she had old weed back from the last time I visited them. I texted her after speaking with Óscar and asked her to throw it away, I would explain later. In my sense-making I knew this event wouldn't be enough to pull me away from my substance abuse problem, but at least I could make a run, like when you're swimming in the ocean and use the force of the wave to swim back to the beach. I wanted to not smoke in Cancún, regain a sense of continuity in my narrative, and keep on as long as I could in Madrid.
However, the day after I arrived we were drinking while watching the football match. I was quiet and kinda bored. My friend jokingly said it looked like I needed some weed. I looked at her in the eye and said "you didn't throw it away, did you?". I should have known, she's not an upholder of truth, but of convenience. In her mind it would be the same to hide it. She hesitated responding and then said she had thrown it away. I said "it's too late, I know you didn't throw it away and that will put me on the edge the rest of the trip. I need you to give it to me". She was taken aback by my certainty but it was true and she was remorseful for not having done what I asked. I told her not to worry, it's completely on me and my decision. Then she showed me where she had hidden it.
I smoked and the weed was so old it barely had any effect. But I relaxed and was able to interact better. I've been smoking this low grade weed for a couple of days and the way I place it in the narrative is that it's like methadone to a heroin user, a stand in to ease sudden quitting and that I will not smoke when I come back to Madrid. But I've made myself so many promises I am reasonably skeptical about myself. Trying and failing is always emotionally taxing. As of late, I had stopped self-recriminations and simply relaxed into it. Work is going good and my life is functional, so what's the big fuzz about it?
I think, through my interaction with Óscar, I have realized there's a potential that is being capped by this addiction. I function well, but I sense there are unrealized possibilities in sobriety. At the same time, we can't make a deal "OK God I'll quit but give me a great life in exchange". But in this state of haze I commit and forget, commit and forget, walking around in circles. I also want to be clear that this is not a problem with weed itself, if I didn't have weed I'd be doing the same by getting drunk everyday, or if I knew harder drugs I would probably be doing those.
I wont commit to anything at this time, I simply observe my own will and try to align my actions to it. Life and health are a direction, not a strict prescription, and for the time being I'll try to walk in this direction, without making a big deal out of it.