methadone's chemical peace and the isolation-in-union of the queue
50 or 60 people all managing to form a line on a narrow walkway waiting for the same small building to unlock its narrow front door and yet still managing to appear alone and stand-offish is a strange sight
Context
The methadone clinic rendered as a daily tableau of the disease's shape: fifty people queued for the same relief and each one somehow alone, choked-eyed at dawn, leaving peaceful and glazed. The chemistry works — it puts eyes back in heads — and the balletic isolation-in-union of the line is the recovery world's own portrait of what wanting-the-same-thing does to a crowd of the powerless.