We Traded Poems in Rehab
Contraband feelings, passed between beds after lights out.
The first poem came to me folded into a square the size of a stamp, passed under the bathroom door by a hand I recognized from the way it shook.
Rehab confiscates things. That's most of what the first day is: a kind woman with a clipboard going through your bag, removing your phone, your mouthwash, your razor, the cord from your hoodie. What's left is you, a plastic mattress cover that crackles when you turn over, and thirty days that each contain roughly nine hundred hours. Nobody confiscates paper. I remember noticing that and filing it away, addict logic, always inventorying what they missed.
The hand under the bathroom door belonged to Marcus, forty-one, third time through, a former electrician who said "copper doesn't lie" the way other people quote scripture. We'd been assigned adjoining rooms. He'd caught me on day five writing in the notebook they give you for "reflections," except I wasn't doing the worksheet, I was writing lines, crossing them out, writing them again. He watched me for a second too long at dinner that night and said, quietly, like a man arranging a deal... "You write?"
In there, everything sounds like a transaction. Turns out this one was.
His stamp-sized square, unfolded, held eight lines about his daughter's bicycle rusting in his ex-wife's garage. The handwriting was blocky, all capitals, the letters of a man who wrote on work orders his whole life. The last line, I can still see it: THE CHAIN STILL FITS THE GEAR, IT'S ME THAT SLIPPED.
It wasn't polished.
It went through me like a nail through drywall.
I sat on the crackling mattress and read it four times, and then I did the only respectable thing, which was write back.
That's how the trade started. Not a workshop. Nobody said the word poetry out loud for the first two weeks, the same way nobody in there says the word love easily; both cost too much. We called them papers. "You got a paper for me?" Marcus would mutter at breakfast, sliding his tray next to mine, and if I did, it moved palm to palm under the table like something that would get us in trouble, which is funny, because the staff would have thrown us a parade. The counselors spent all day begging us to express feelings. We could only do it as smuggling. Recovery is embarrassing like that: the front door stands wide open and you still climb in the window, because the window is the only move you trust.
By week three there were five of us. Deb, sixty, wine, grandmother of six, wrote in perfect church-bulletin cursive about her kitchen at 4 p.m., the hour she called "the tunnel." A kid we called Radio, nineteen, pills, who wrote raps he insisted weren't poems and then counted syllables on his fingers like a monk. And Tomas, who barely spoke in group, court-ordered, arms folded for ninety straight minutes, who one night passed me a paper with a single line on it: "I miss it like it was a person, and it was never a person." In group the next morning the counselor asked how everyone was doing and Tomas said "fine," and I looked at the floor and thought... you liar, I have your heart in my sock drawer.
Every one of us could say "fine" out loud and tell the truth only on paper, folded small, passed after lights out, the way you'd hand someone a lit candle in a building where light was against the rules.
I want to be careful not to make it prettier than it was. The papers did not cure anyone. Deb left on day nine of my stay, checked herself out against advice, and hugged us in the parking lot; her tunnel got her back within the month... we heard. Radio got caught with contraband that wasn't paper and had to start his count over. And there were nights the trade went dark, nights nobody had anything, because withdrawal was sitting on someone's chest, or a phone call home had gone the way phone calls home go. Silence under the bathroom door has a texture too... You learn to read that also.
But here is what the papers did do, and I have thought about this for six years, because six years is what I have now.
They gave us a place to put it.
Craving, the counselors kept explaining, is energy that insists on going somewhere; the whole game is redirecting the current. Marcus the electrician put it better. "You don't fight a live wire," he told me one night, both of us sitting on the floor of the hallway between our doors, technically against the rules, definitely worth it. "You ground it. You give it a path that doesn't go through anybody." Eight lines about a rusting bicycle was him grounding a current that used to go through his daughter's Christmases. My papers were the same. Every line I wrote was a minute my hands were doing this instead of that, and thirty days contain a lot of minutes, and I needed every single one to have a job.
The night before Marcus left, three days before me, he knocked on the wall, our signal, and passed me the longest paper he'd ever written, a full page of block capitals, and told me to read it after he was gone. It was about the two of us, more or less. About how he'd walked in the third time certain he was a finished thing, a fuse already blown, and how being handed a stranger's folded square had informed him otherwise. The last lines said: EVERY MAN IN HERE IS A HOUSE WITH THE POWER CUT. THE WIRING'S STILL GOOD. SOMEBODY JUST HAS TO COME CHECK.
I have that page in a frame now. People assume it's a famous poem.
It is to me.
On the outside, I kept writing, because stopping felt like leaving a door open behind me. Ninety meetings in ninety days, and most nights a paper too, except now they went into a real notebook, and eventually, hands shaking in a whole new way, onto the internet, where I found other people writing about healing without flinching, and a page of profiles of writers nobody had heard yet that I read the way Marcus read copper: proof the current was real. Year two, I entered a piece about the hallway floor into a monthly poetry contest. It didn't place, and I called Marcus to complain, and he laughed his gravel laugh and said, "You wrote it in a house with the lights on. That's the prize, you idiot." He has nine years now. We still trade papers, by actual mail, folded small on purpose, a joke that isn't one. His grandkid rides a bike he keeps oiled like a shrine.
People ask what saved me in there, expecting a counselor's name, a step number, a moment of clarity in the chapel. There were versions of all that, and I don't discount any of it. But when I'm honest... I say it was the papers, the whole crooked underground railroad of them, feelings folded into stamps and moved bed to bed by people who could not yet say them out loud. Some places teach you to write about new beginnings. Rehab taught me that a beginning is just eight true lines passed under a bathroom door.
The chain still fits the gear. Six years in, I'm the one who checks the wiring now, and when some shaking new hand slides me something folded, I stop everything.
You always read the paper. That's the code.
You read it four times, and then you write back.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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