What does it look like?

The falling leaves cascaded around me as I stood before the cross, in that cemetery that day. Her name engraved on the headstone looked raw, like it was carved there with a dull knife. Perhaps my eyes translated it in my heart, a dull knife cutting deeply. I remember her well, the only person who touched me when I was going down: heck! I was rock bottom...drugs and alcohol and needing the fix everyday. I had no excuse for this episode in my life, it was just me sliding down the chute into the scum of human life. I had nothing except for my sex, and that I used well. I remember how I stooped to the lowest, squeezed between men chasing the dragon, hoping for a jaunt and maybe a shafting, if I was lucky to be able to buy the stuff. She stood over me, and said 'you will always stoop lower and lower if you don't stop now...' Somehow these words went deep. Humiliation dawned on my foggy mind. I knew I was missing many things in my life then, and one was Self-Respect. I moved away slowly from the scene. It took me many years, but the way I am now, a quiet small town schoolteacher, was due to her words. She drowned in her bathtub after an overdose, so they said. I don't know. I think she was just tired of chasing that 'Self Respect", we craved so much. We didn't even know what it really was.