Intervention

We find you curled on the couch like the embryo that squirmed inside me, immersed in the substance you’ve come to rely on like the amniotic fluid where you once floated complacently, now red dots down both your arms like mosquito bites and yet, with dignity, you ask, “Please may I put on my pants,” as you rise from the sofa like a resurrection in the dark predawn morning with the sheet across your body, shoulders still strong despite the dissipation in your concave cheeks and thin thighs. The women turn away from your nakedness, including me, even though I cupped your little naked buttocks in my hand for a photo soon after you were born, your tiny chest smooth in the subtle winter light. You pull on a T-shirt, push aside the rumpled bedclothes and sit down as we begin to read our letters just like on T.V., the testimonials to the person you have been then what you have become that has hurt us, and each of us, finally, pleads with you to go to rehab, as we have been instructed to by John, the interventionist; first your sister tearfully addresses “her big brother”; your friends attest to your accomplishments, then Daddy sobs more than we have ever seen him cry. Dawn trickles through the windows like the Mexican Black Tar you have been injecting into your veins, posters of skulls, revolvers and knives not quite obliterating the Austin light. We bundle you into the waiting car where you hunch over and sleep, nodding like an old man all the way to rehab in the San Antonio hills.