For close to a month now I’ve been watering dead flowers every afternoon.
The flowers were beautiful once, but because I failed to water them a few times, they soon withered and died.
I am acutely aware that they are dead, aware that they are never going to be beautiful again, but I won’t stop watering them. I keep doing it over and over, hoping that sooner or later they will come back to life.
Something about this practice makes me think of what the addict faces when wrestling his addiction. Of how he loses the “high” of whatever once pleased him—drugs, alcohol, money, sex, possessions—but how, in his emptiness, he clings tighter to the memory of how they used to make him feel, how he keeps coming back to them in hopes that—against all odds—they will suddenly, magically, please him once again.
It all reminds me of a passage from Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe when Edmund has been tempted by and has eaten the magic Turkish delights and, though he now has the option of good, solid food, has left in search of more Turkish Delight.
Lewis says, “There’s nothing that spoils the taste of good ordinary food half so much as the memory of bad magic food.”
It is the memory of what was once beautiful that keeps the addict from turning his back on that which has been killing him; it is the false hope that it will miraculously return that keeps him watering dead flowers.
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