Cocaine Sunflowers
Oct 2022
Maeve Healy
The sun and her colors
The sun is a bright shade of yellow today, and it looks like those drawings your classmates made in elementary school of the sun wearing sunglasses, as it smiles above little trees and houses. I have a little painting set on the coffee table in front of me and I am diligently working on a sunflower. It’s not very good, but I’m okay with that. You won’t see me at art school anytime soon. As I pick up the paintbrush and dip it in the water, I spill a little on my shirt, turning a little part of it dark red.
21.5 million people
An addiction, whether a behavior or a drug, can be all kinds of dependencies. The U.S. Substance Abuse Administration estimates that approximately 21.5 million people aged 12 or older have an addiction to something.
21.5 million people.
There are some that are functional, and there are some that are not. There are mean drunks, and there are kind drunks. There are people who live for their addictions, and there are people who are addicted to live. 21.5 million people, with daughters and sons, with mothers and fathers, with friends and families.
before the rain
The sun is gone now, leaving just the rays in the horizon illuminating the buildings that stand across the lake, 30 miles away. The thunderclouds come out. My dad laughs.
More thoughts on the color yellow + coffee
My mother comes back outside and hands me the yellow coffee mug filled with a donut shop blend. I find it strange because she refuses to let me drink coffee in the afternoons.
“It will only make your sleeping patterns worse,” she says.
The yellow mug I drink from every day belonged to my great uncle. It has a smiley face on the side.
The sun has started to actually set now, and the light around me transforms from solar heat to the golden glow that makes you feel as though you’re being hugged with the sun’s brightly colored arms.
thoughts on the rain
According to a pagan-wiccan site I found through a quick google search, “rain has certain purifying and harmonizing qualities” that can help cleanse a space of any negative energy or past trauma. I’m not Wiccan. I’m just a Buddhist-Catholic with a lot of connection to the world around me.
I tend to feel much better when I sit in the rain and let the drops fall on me. It lifts the weight off your shoulders and makes you feel lighter again.
There’s something about the rain that can stop all time and force the weight off of your shoulders. It cleanses your spirit of its pain, even if it’s just for a minute. And it’s beautiful.
The warped fashion sense of my father
My father walks up the stairs not long after my mother goes inside. His blue shirt that he refuses to throw out — even though he bought it in the 1980s — is covered in paint from some project he was working on somewhere by the garage. I make a mental note to throw the shirt away before he tries to wear it in public. He connects to the speaker to listen to his playlist instead of my mother’s. We each have very different music tastes: she loved Pearl Jam; my father and I, Fleetwood Mac. It’s the only thing that can redeem his horrible outfit choices.
Children of addiction
My cousins Niamh and Rory are beautiful children. They are children of a messy, atrocious, horrid divorce, due to a disgusting, debilitating, sad addiction; however, they are beautiful, and happy, and loved, and sweet, and smart. They smile at the sun. They rescue baby frogs from the dunegrass. They throw rocks in the water. You would never know what their father was.
niamh
It looks like it is going to rain soon. Niamh puts her towel back inside.
“I like the rain,” she says, “it tickles.”
A small gust of wind hits my face. It feels like a kiss from God.
Thunder only happens when it’s raining
Stevie Nicks said she wrote “Dreams” in about ten minutes. It was a song about her perspective of the end of her and fellow Fleetwood member Lindsey Buckingham’s relationship. Mick Fleetwood said the song was conceived during the craziest period of their lives: they were doing cocaine, living a nocturnal lifestyle, and recording at all hours of the day.
“Dreams” is a beautiful, yet sad story of frustration: it was created because the man Stevie loved couldn’t see the beauty of their relationship. He hurt himself and those he loved in the process.
Questions
There are 330 million people in the United States, and you wonder every single day why God picked him to be one of the 21.5 million sufferers of addiction. A father. A brother. A son. A man who couldn’t be what the world needed him to be.
Why is your family subjected to this?
Why must we suffer?
Nature can harm beings too
I listen as the tides of the lake ebb and flow, crashing on top of the rocks and forcing the little dune birds to fly out of their burrows deep in the grass.
Yin and Yang
“The universe,” says ThoughtCo, “is composed of competing and complementary forces.”
In other words, there is no light without darkness. There is no good without evil; there is no God without the Devil. There is no force without inertia, and there is no water without fire, and there is no pain without euphoria, and there is no beauty without horror.
My favorite song by Fleetwood is Little Lies, but I listen to Dreams the most “Queue up Dreams for me?” I ask my dad, taking another sip of my coffee. He nods and looks back down at his phone.
My own addiction
“Can I have a sip of your coffee?” Niamh asks.
I shake my head immediately.
“No, love,” I laugh a little bit, “you probably won’t like it. But if you do, you’ll end up getting addicted like me.” She giggles and squirms a bit in my arms.
about beauty
Stevie Nicks’ cocaine-infused words of Dreams make me wonder how two people who once loved each other so much could hate each other, yet still create beauty that lives on for decades after they’ll be gone. It perplexes me.
before the rain part II
“It’s fitting,” he says, “thunder only happens when it’s raining.” He begins picking up my paint set and goes in the house, and Niamh and I follow him in like little ducks. It begins to storm.
Yin and Yang part II
Fucked up people can create really beautiful things. Addiction is horrid, but from what I see in my baby cousin as she smiles in my arms, and as I hear Stevie sing about her ex, I see that there’s still a lot of beauty that can be found within it. People can heal, too, and create things even more beautiful.
when the rain washes you clean, you’ll know
Healing, I think. I throw off my shirt so only my swimsuit gets wet, grab Niamh’s hand, and run out into the rain. The thunder claps again and we stand outside as the rain pours down. She spins in circles with her arms outstretched and smiles once again.
Maeve Healy is from Chicago, IL and studies in the College of Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.