I can hear Joseph ascending the stairs. His slow, shuffling footsteps feel unenthusiastic today. I’ve come to this place, known to me for most of my life, to talk to Joseph about his drug use. A conversation that he reluctantly agreed to only after I promised him there wasn’t an intervention at the end. When he meets me at the rugged kitchen table, I smile and thank him for agreeing to talk to me.
We are in a house, where he resides in one of the basement bedrooms with his girlfriend, Jess, and their six-month old baby girl, Sunny. The kitchen is a common area, but has remained empty since my arrival. Joseph is wearing a white wife beater top, that hangs loosely on his tall, thin frame. Immediately, I notice the marks along his hands
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After all, it was just a couple of joints smoked between friends and he didn’t even feel any different afterward. “Things got harder” he says, after his mother died. “I actually searched for the high then. It helped me not feel like she wasn’t there anymore.” When he talks about this, he starts to unconsciously rub his arms, pausing ever so slightly over his recent abrasions. We chat a bit about how our views of the reservation differed so much with him being a full-time resident and me, who came to visit and found it fun and untamed. He laughs when I tell him a story about people he knows, and we both find it unusual that we never ran into each other at some backroad gathering.
Joseph has tried rehab three times in his life, but heroin has maintained its grip. He says he was once sober for seventeen months before falling prey once again. “The feeling never leaves you. Heroin feels like my mother’s hugging me again,” he says. If someone had to choose between feeling lonely or their mother’s embrace, why would they choose loneliness? But heroin is a trap and a lie, telling your body that it feels good all over, even in the worst of physical circumstances. Feeling that pull is what leads many people in our community down the path of habitual drug