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I first saw Trainspotting probably a year or two after it came out. I was fourteen in 1997, and the world Trainspotting presented blew my mind with possibilities.

“Will I become a heroin addict?” I wondered. At the time, I gauged the odds to be about 50/50: either I would get into hardcore drugs at some point during a troubled youth, or I wouldn’t. It would probably largely depend on what “crowds” I fell into in high school. Could be the wrong crowd! I could go that way! Shit could get fucked up. Or, just as likely, it wouldn’t. But I’d always been suspicious of adults, myself in ten years included. I viewed future-Adrianne as a complete stranger, divorced from current-Adrianne through circumstance, vulnerability, and hormones. The potential paths seemed endless, an infinitely branching fractal.

But I figured you could probably draw a line down the center of those possibilities, and half of them would involve heroin.

I was thinking the other day, during a quiet walk to yoga class, about what I now considered the odds of me becoming a heroin addict. I decided that this was — maybe — two percent. To be honest, I’m being a little generous there. Like, I guess I could get outrageously drunk and pass out on my way home and land on top of a needle. A needle full of heroin. That’s what the young kids use these days, right? Needles? But then it occurred to me that I don’t even drink, really, which seems to close all kinds of whimsical, happenstancical doors.

Call me crazy. It made me a little sad.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 8th, 2008 at 5:47 pm and is filed under A Story. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.