SmokeLong Quarterly

(In the mid-1990s, singer-songwriter Stevie Nicks withdrew from the benzodiazepine known as Klonopin after an eight-year dependence. In 2020, unable to tour, perhaps Stevie would open a small clinic for Klonopin sufferers, like you.)

If Stevie Nicks was your Klonopin withdrawal counselor, she’d explain that the first session is called the intake, so you’d take each other in. She, a 72-year-old rock legend and licensed professional counselor, a tiny woman carrying layers of black skirts and a rose-painted smile. You’d be all under-eye circles and a fear of everything. A mother, 40, not quite sober. Stevie would offer you crackers and goat cheese and forget to take notes while you spoke. She’d stare you down, reading the length of your life. You’d wonder if she was inventing you.

She’d ask about your symptoms, and you, slouched on her purple velvet couch, would scrape for the words. You’d speak of a murmur of the beat of yourself, the smell of your bones, the shy shaking ghosts in your chest – this pile you’ve built from the fourteen hundred days you’ve taken a pill.

**

If Stevie Nicks was your Klonopin withdrawal counselor, you’d ask if she could talk about her own experience, those 47 days in the hospital, her hair turning gray and her skin peeling off. She’d twist in her black dress and say, “You don’t need to absorb others’ pain to solve your own.” You’d tell her that a problem with your pain is it’s so empty. The burn turning to cold and fading to ache. Pain is the discomfort of time dragged out of you. Pain is never making your bed, is your child bringing you a book you don’t open, is the stack of days you refuse to look at yourself.

Stevie would say, okay, enough, please! She’d have you select a focal point in the room for your 10-minute meditation. You’d choose the shiny metal urn of her late Yorkshire terrier, Sulamith, and you’d wonder what is the opposite of your four years of self-administered sedation. Is it the triumphant hooo-ahhh at the center of “Edge of Seventeen”? Is it the humiliation of becoming the version of yourself you’re meant to be?

**

If Stevie Nicks was your Klonopin withdrawal counselor, she’d tell you at the end of one session that she’d had a holy vision. But at the beginning of the next session, she wouldn’t remember what it was about. She’d say she thinks it involved Tom Petty.

You’d have 27 days off the pills, and sensations back in your face and hands. You’d crinkle your mouth at Stevie and nod. It would feel good.

The next time you’re on the purple couch, she’d appear not as your exquisite 72-year-old bitch-mother, but as her late-1980s self, red lips and giant sleeves and hair sprayed into a thorny blonde bramble. “Over 30 days off, huh. So, what’s that like?” she’d say to you, her voice low and steady, like a microwave. Oh shit, you’d realize, this is Klonopin Stevie, before she knew it was the meds wrecking her life. Don’t do it, you’d say. Don’t keep taking it. She’d shake her head at you, the hair unmoving. “It’s already done.”

**

If Stevie Nicks was your Klonopin withdrawal counselor, she’d ask what one song you’d like to hear (in exchange for her clinic not taking insurance) and you’d request “Sisters of the Moon,” and she’d say, sorry, she doesn’t do that one anymore.

And during one session, Stevie Nicks, your cunt-serving goddess and Klonopin withdrawal counselor, fed up with you in a matronly way, might wrap you in her shawl, twirl a few times, and suddenly you’d be just steps from the biggest crowd you’d ever seen. You’d know the look of the stage from your insomniac nights watching old concerts: it’s the 1983 US Festival. Stevie’s gloriously feathered hair would catch in her cocaine necklace as she’d hand you a tambourine. What’s happening? you’d ask her. “Exposure therapy,” she’d say with a wink. And then you’d be on stage in your anachronistic Tori Amos t-shirt and yoga pants, slapping the tambourine to “Outside the Rain.” Stevie – your counselor! – would at once be 35 and 72 years old, both addicted and recovered, a streak across time, everyone she’s ever been. This could be you, too – truth stretched across years, landing in a heart craving the permission to be good.

Next thing you know, you’d be back in bed with your phone, the old concerts, the radiating itch of the past. Stevie herself said that taking the Klonopin was her only regret, the way it stole years from her life. But here you’d be with all her performances, infinite Stevies twirling in an infinite present.

If Stevie Nicks was your Klonopin withdrawal counselor, you’d play “Sisters of the Moon” for yourself and try to get up, get up, get across the room, just for today.

The next version of yourself is there.

Perhaps she is waiting to meet you.