From the Other Side of My Bed

11. My ex

Many times death tried to kiss me, but life got in the way.
And I don't know why.
I had always been repelled by what life gives, and here it is, smiling at me each time.

I spent three days in Maud's apartment, mostly on her sofa with a bucket ready for me to throw up on, which I did every time I opened my eyes and Maud was always there, lovingly pulling my hair back and patting my back as I threw up.
Three days where no one knew where I was. I remember only being conscious enough to tell my job I was sick and passed out right away.
They didn't care.
I didn't care.
No one cared.
Except Jerome.
Who had looked for me in vain because the entire time I was with Maud.
I didn't eat, just drank water and threw up for a week after the overdose.
I must have lost ten pounds because everyone said I was growing too skinny.
And somehow that cheered me up.
To know that I was finally losing weight was so rewarding.
And mind you, I was never fat.
If I was fat, I was fat in all the right places.
I was well proportioned, with an hourglass body and no belly.
But my entire life I was pushed by others to be boney.
And I just couldn't become boney.
I tried but failed every time.
I loved food too much.
I loved food...
Now it was not part of my life.

After my overdose, I didn't learn my lesson and continued to go to Maud's apartment but avoided drugs from strangers.
Maybe some LSD here and there but when I knew if I was going to do drugs, I just didn't smoke my weed.
I just liked that I could be this mystery of a girl who showed up and didn't really talk to anyone and danced all night and drank a lot and was always smiling.
It was like I was me again from the past.

During this time, i got as depressed as i was back in christmas of 2020.
When that Christmas happened, no one texted or called me.
I didn't text or called anyone.
Just drank alone in my apartment the entire night and promptly went to bed by midnight.

Then New Year's Eve happened.
We went with Jerome to Bird's House, a local hidden spot in the heart of Chandler, where it housed a variety of birds in big, tall cages and you sat outside surrounded by trees. A band was playing that night, and some of the songs were from Coldplay and I was so high, all I could do was sit there and enjoy each song while others danced in their seats and had fun.
I never told Jerome about the overdose, only until I stopped smoking and when I was ready, his world turned upside down and he felt horrible for me.
"How did you keep this to yourself for so long?"
"I don't know." And I didn't know.

-

Jerome calls my navy blue futon the 'depression' sofa.
Mostly because that's where sometimes (or should I say often?) I spend vast majority of my time laying on it, wishing to just... die.
It's not fun to read about your favorite character going through sadness, or pain, (if you even want to call me your favorite) but that's what my life is about.
It's painful to even open my eyes, and I apologize for not writing to you but lately, i feel pain even in my hair follicles. I toss around on the sofa, not finding a good position to just lay down on, and find myself freezing at night, covered in papa's green blanket, then the blanket makes me more depressed because he gave me this blanket when I traveled to New York alone.

Before the pandemic, I was taking large steps to become somebody in life.
I had dropped my small, low paying job as a cashier at a well known retailer and was promoted to become the next licensed cosmetologist of the place, and to top it all off, i was asked to go to new york by a beauty academy that wanted recently licensed cosmetologists to be their next platform artists and i went to get training on it.
Everything was smiling for me, I had gone to New York for the first time as an impressionable nineteen year old girl. I had traveled to Seattle, Miami and soon Charleston but then the pandemic happened and it hit hard one march 30th of 2020.
People came rushing in, trying to gather up whatever they got in their hands and we were so full of people in that small location, ringing them all in was hell and to top it all, it was raining.
I remember that day clearly because from then on, everything changed.