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he IS worth more dead than alive. He has to force himself to drive home cloaked in an unspeakable pallor of shame, reeking of smoke, reeling with the knowledge that he can not pay the house payment this month or last. She is unable to meet even the minimum payment required of each and every credit card she holds. Writing a check at the telecheck window produces the shame of a "code 4, call us immediately" 24/7 hotline.

Unsure of what to do next, she glances at her watch and knows she must be at work in an hour and three of her nails are torn or shredded, all ten are filthy. Keeping the secret, silencing the exhaustion that roars alongside the incessant dinging of bells and alarms replaying themselves in her inner eardrum all morning, she cannot tell a soul of her evening, of her terror; instead, she must devise a way to acquire more money.

Pulling away from the curb, another small piece of soul departs the gambler's body. He rolls down the window as the tears roll down his face.

I know the gambler's song: I've written the melody, I've harmonized with others who struggle to breathe while pressed up tight against every nerve center in the mind, in the soul, in the damaged body of the addict. I've sat long hours in emergency rooms with vomiting, shuddering addicts. Too, too often they once sat with me. Knowing our obsessions, our inability to stop ourselves no matter what the cost of our collective losses, we no longer bother to call for companionship in these vacant, sterile spaces between sanity and not quite, between life and something less. We can't even stand ourselves and refuse to foist our losing self upon others; we refuse to look into our own reflected eyes as we attempt to clean the filth from our hands in the public restroom, afraid that if we do, we will have found the face of the gambler.

Learn more about this author, Judith Hillard.
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