Whatever the cost, I will pay

The pharmacy after dark. The elderly - and safe - shoppers looking for compression socks and reading glasses have gone to bed, and the opiate addicts have awoken. A young guy with a tattoo that covers his entire neck and some of his chin ignores the line and drops into the chair you take when you are invited to consult with the pharmacist. The pharmacist does not look at him but knows he is there. No eye contact. Gives him the methadone drink. It seems wrong that there is no privacy for this interaction- but maybe they don’t want to be alone together. I don’t know. 

I am at the pharmacy after dark because I forgot to pick up my migraine medication earlier in the day, when I meant to. Although I considered it, it’s not really a medication I should skip for a night. Doing so is likely to bring on a morning migraine, the dizzy kind. I didn’t remember I had run out until I was getting ready for bed, and annoyingly this meant getting dressed again and going out when I wanted to be in my pajamas. I didn’t bother putting on a bra. (What’s the point when you’re wearing a winter coat anyway?) The pharmacist looks me in the eye when he asks what I need. My lack of neck tattoo is working for me. 

I don’t want to be around the neck tattoo guy either. It isn’t that I do not understand what brings him here - I really really do. I lived with my sister while she was spiraling down the same pathway. I lived in the same house with her as a child, the same house that may have caused the whole trauma that made her start. I don’t know anything for certain but I am familiar with the genre. It makes me sick to my stomach. Not in an ‘I’m better than you and you disgust me’ kind of way.  More like an ‘I know you and it makes me so sad to recognize you that I can hardly breathe’ kind of way. Sometimes I think I am done with all of that heartache, and sometimes a kid with a fucking neck tattoo can make it all rise up in the back of my throat and suffocate me while I’m standing in line waiting for my bloody migraine medication when I just want to be at home in my pajamas. 

Whatever. He’s taking methadone, and that’s several steps further down the road to recovery than my sister ever attempted. So maybe I should celebrate Neck Tattoo Guy, smile at him. Give him a fist bump in front of the rack of compression socks. Or at least make some fucking  eye contact. But I don’t want to. I want to make it to the liquor store before it closes. I want to get home and get back into my pajamas, take my migraine medication, and pour a big glass full of Irony and Hypocrisy, and drink deeply. And congratulate myself on dodging another migraine, whatever the cost.