Philip Seymour Hoffman
Last summer I found a small box stashed away in my apartment,
a box filled with enough Vicodin to kill me. I would have sworn
that I'd thrown it away years earlier, but apparently not. I stared
at the white pills blankly for a long while, I even took a picture of
them, before (finally, definitely) throwing them away. I'd been
sober (again) for some years when I found that box, but every
addict has one— a little box, metaphorical or actual— hidden
away. Before I flushed them I held them in my palm, marveling
that at some point in the not-so-distant past it seemed a good
idea to keep a stash of pills on hand. For an emergency, I told
myself. What kind of emergency? What if I needed a root canal
on a Sunday night? This little box would see me through until
the dentist showed up for work the next morning. Half my
brain told me that, while the other half knew that looking into
that box was akin to seeing a photograph of myself standing on
the edge of a bridge, a bridge in the familiar dark neighborhood
of my mind, that comfortable place where I could somehow
believe that fuck it was an adequate response to life.