How Am I Supposed To Feel?

By: Marc McMahon

*This story originally published for me by Scars Publications in Down In The Dirt Magazine

My friend is in trouble and needs some help right now, and I can’t help. Why don’t I help you ask? It’s not that I don’t want to help him, I do, I wish with everything in me that I could kick the front door in like Superman or something, save the day, and get us both out of there alive but, I can’t, I just so wish I could.

My friend needs help and I Can’t help him, if I tried it could easily, probably, most likely, cost me my life and still leave him in imminent danger so that won’t work. I can’t call the police because, well, if I were in a normal neighborhood/town I most definitely already would have my friends, I already would have, happily!

But my area’s not like that, let’s say we handle shit our own way. Raised from children to respect the law but never to call them for assistance, nope, Pa always said that’s what families are for. It’s an old mindset I know but it’s country out here.

We’re kind of in a rural setting second largest county in my state but that’s not saying much since there are barely 4 million people in my whole state. We are the second-largest town in our state with a population of less than 200,000 if you can believe that. So you see there are not a lot of people in my state.

The states above and below me are populated with 8 million in one and almost 40 million in the other so we have a lot of woods here. Logging is still and will probably always be a thriving industry in this great state of mine it’s so beautiful here because of the lack of population and all the trees. Do you know more marijuana is harvested in my state each year than in all the other states combined? Ya, we smoke lots of weed here it’s cool, we still have hippies too.

Oh ya, straight out of the sixties, drop acid, tye died shirts, and hand-woven clothes heading to town on the weekend to get supplies as they pull up in the classic hippie converted school bus turned family home for the three adults and two teen kids that call it their abode. They pull up to the local hippie-friendly store/coop where they unload their produce harvest and take it into the store to barter for what supplies they need.

But anyways, what am I doing this story’s not about hippies so let me get on with it.

You know it sucks when you watch your friend walk into a room full of poisonous snakes but he thinks the room is full of friends and you watch them as they slowly begin to rip, pull, and tear your friend apart as they stare at you grinning the whole time because they know there is not a damn thing you can do to stop them.

Helpless, powerless, is how you feel as you watch an event such as this unfold—standing there absolutely incapable, of doing anything that would help your friend. Then having to watch something like this turns out to be almost as horrible of torture as the torture itself. But to make things even worse, I walked away to come and tell you all about this, and when I returned I opened the door and stepped into our apartment about three steps, and my worse fear comes to life as there lies my friend, in the bathroom on the floor dead. and, fuck, I really wanted to help.

I found my friend dead I said!………NOW, how am I supposed to feel?

About The Author: Marc is a 53-year-old Author, Speaker, and Soldier in a war to loosen the grasp that Substance Abuse has on our society. He is a Father, Son, and friend to all seeking refuge from this incorrigible disease. Marc resides in the beautiful Pacific Northwest where he enjoys writing, hiking, and kicking the disease of addiction in the teeth every chance he gets. As Marc always likes to say, be blessed, my friends.