Nate S. [new late night post, more editing]

“My name is Nate, and I’m addicted to anything that gets me high.” There’s usually a small bout of clapping after that, slightly disorienting to any newbie in the AA or NA program. Nate is a man with a lot of addictions, one of the walking testimonies that addiction is a singular disease with a hundred paths.

He’s from the outskirts of town, one of several formally isolated communities getting swallowed up in urban sprawl. He has a wife and a beautiful little girl, both of whom I’ve met twice now. The first time was running in to look at the schedule and the second was today when I helped him load his groceries into my work van.

He was being transferred over to the PHP apartments after spending nearly three weeks in detox getting the heroin, crack, and meth out of his system. His attitude had changed a lot sense I first met him. We joked on the ride over to PHP about him calling me the “fun police” after catching him trying to cheat phone policy.

“I just hope my wife sees it.”

We joked the day before about how he needed to get his wife the biggest diamond in town for their next big anniversary. She waited three years for him to get out of prison for selling an ounce and a half of cocaine to a narc.

“That was the first time I sold to anyone outside my circle of friends… first time. Always happens like that, ya know?”

He was sober for a year and a half after that. He completely threw himself to the church. Then he slipped. He fell harder than he ever had before.

The catalyst to him coming here was his wife sending their daughter into the garage him get high. He’d snap at her and tell her to get back into the house.

She finally left him. She could handle being without him for three years in prison but couldn’t take him getting high inside the house with their daughter there.

He spent a week getting more messed up than he ever had before he finally getting into rehab.

Nate is one of the scarier patients in how much he reminds myself of all the possible me’s. Maybe had I stayed with the wrong friends a little longer, had people not come into my life at certain points… I could see myself in his shoes, especially when we talk Pink Floyd albums and our favorite live shows.