the ritual that no longer needs the drug — "Cleaning is maybe a form of…"

Recovery's quietest redemption stated in two sentences: the compulsion that used to require the high has quietly detached from it and become just the thing she likes, a meditation for people too new in sobriety to hold still. The disease's own machinery — the ritualized, anxious ordering — is not destroyed but repurposed, the same hands doing the same work with the drug subtracted from underneath it.