Addict In Black ✔

Chapter Thirteen

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: SHAME

A lot of people who find out about the things I do immediately figure I'm just a pathetic "druggie" with nothing to say that is worth hearing. They talk endless bull shit of "recovery!" They make it sound like some amazing discovery...don't they know I'm far too busy trying to recover me?
-Ashly Lorenzana

Having an addiction is like sharing your room with a monster that periodically mauls you and then crawls back under your bed, and you don't think you can complain because you were the one that wanted to invite the monster there in the first place. 

Even when it's not hurting you directly, you know it's there with you, in your space. 

You know the monster stinks and though you can't smell it anymore, everyone else smells it in your hair and knows you live with a monster. You know it too. 

You can hear it, breathing, moving under the mattress, scratching at the frame. You can see it on the very edge of your vision every time you leave the house, and realize that it's just not in your room, it's following you and you can't stop it. You never know when it's going to attack, but you know exactly how it will and how to prevent it, how to feed it into sedation. 

It's a very horrible, very refined psychological torture that not everyone can understand, that you think nobody but you can understand. And there's nothing, absolutely nothing you can do about it -because your room remains the same, and you keep inviting that monster again and again because that way, it won't kill you. 

The entire time you don't realize that it's killing you anyway.

When I was an addiction, I started to realize it was killing me the same time I realized death didn't want me. It was like a double edged sword.

Addiction was killing me, slowly.

I wanted to be dead.

But death didn't want me when everyone else did, she wanted me, the demons wanted me.

Sometimes it even felt like the drugs wanted me, it was like they begged for me as much as I begged for them.

A symbiotic relationship, I think it's called.

They wanted to be taken, and I wanted to take them. Who better than someone who already knows their taste, their texture, their feeling by heart, who could describe the effects of Xanax tabs better than a doctor and could tell you the way morphine feels better than a person with a lethal illness using it to keep themselves alive.

I guess addiction is a lethal illness.

And I did use it to keep myself alive.

Every time I decided to end my own life I was sober, because what better head space to decide something like that?

Honestly I wish I was high every time.

That would give me something better to say when I'm asked about it instead of telling someone how useless someone has to feel to make themselves bleed out on their bathroom floor.

My father thought yelling at me, introducing me to his business partners would somehow fix me. That somehow throwing me into the same work that I watch consume my parents would make me whole.

What did I care for the logic of a man pretending to be king? 

The words he would try to tell me are laws? 

It was only for drugs that I ignored him. 

It was only drugs that made me break them.

Why I'll never understand is why the parents who yell and scream at their children, call them names and make them feel bad in general are the ones who teach us about respect, how we should respect them. But when those very same kids they're yelling at try to defend themselves the way the parents taught it's disrespectful.