Читать книгу Where We Came From - Tigress Dekko - Страница 12

[15 years old]

The thing about getting addicted to pills is that you become quite used to experimenting

Any medication you look at starts to become tempting.

So when I was fresh out of rehab again and I started to feel a relapse coming on

I remembered once taking a few of my mom’s antidepressants and nothing had gone wrong

I had gotten a little high, nothing too crazy

It might be a good way to abate me

Because I knew I was gonna fuck up again and it was going to happen soon

But if I could do something different, I could put it off for at least a day or two.

So I found my mom’s prescription pills, I think I took maybe four, before bed one night

And I tripped enough to make a man and a story appear out of the little green light

On the fire alarm in my mother’s bedroom; this visual comforted me

The only negative side effect is that I had awful and vivid dreams.

I dreamed I could hear God’s voice threatening to pull me through to the other side

It was so real that I genuinely wasn’t sure if I would wake up the next day and be alive

I thought it was a sign that I needed to kill myself, needed to at long last disappear

Besides, I figured drugs would kill me at some point within the next few years.

To ease my mind from divine confusion, I took some more pills, this time eight

That’s how many triple cs I would do at once, I figured if it’d make me feel great

I wasn’t prepared for how terrifying it is to hallucinate

Especially when you aren’t expecting the drugs to affect you that way.

I was lying on my bed when all of a sudden it hit me

I wanted to close my eyes, but every time I did it made me more dizzy

It felt like I was literally spiraling out of control

Like I was falling out of the world and had nothing to hold

I felt glued to my bed, as if my eyes were the only thing that could move

I was paralyzed and did not know what to do

I glanced at my closet doors and between the two of them, I thought I saw a face

I looked away and looked back to see another man in his place

Then there were two of them, hiding in my room and watching me

I knew they weren’t real, but what if they could be?

I tried to ignore them, tried to tell myself I was on drugs, it wasn’t real

But I started getting more and more scared of how their hands around my throat would feel

What if they had been there all along and their timing happened to be perfect?

If I died here, in my room, high and alone, who would even suspect

That it wasn’t my doing, but instead that of two criminals with brilliant minds?

Was I exactly the target they had been trying to find?

I couldn’t bear to be killed right then and there, but I didn’t know where to go

I went to the backyard to smoke a cigarette, my mom was there too because early evening was the coolest time of the day to mow

I watched her go back and forth across the yard, begging myself not to say anything about the pills I had taken

But my reality had been placed inside of a glass jar and then shaken

And dumped back out into the world in a jumbled up mess

I wasn’t a body or a person, but a confused, high, paranoid ball of stress

The colors of the world didn’t look right, nothing was familiar

I had never been high like this, nothing even similar

I tried to relax into it, but I was far too terrified

So when my mom sat down to join me in a smoke, I told her I thought I was about to die

She was pissed that I had stolen from her

She didn’t know what else to do other than supervise me while I suffered

She made me follow her into the bathroom and lay on the floor while she took a bath

I couldn't tell if I was overdosing or having a severe panic attack

She didn’t want to take me to the hospital because she was convinced I would be fine

And because if she had, I would have definitely been sent back to the hospital for the sixth time

I couldn’t bear the thought of going back to my mental health jail

Not when I had gotten out nearly two months early because I’d convinced the staff I had been doing so well

For hours, it seemed, I seized on the tile floors

My mom told me to remember this moment, remember this fear, and use it as another reason to understand that I can’t do drugs anymore

I thought that maybe the dream I’d had the night before was a premonition of dying today

She told me that no God would ever wish for me to die this way

And that even she had strange dreams when she took a single pill, as was prescribed,

I was just hallucinating when I heard a voice telling me I should die.

After her bath we had to go to Quik-Trip to buy more cigarettes

And I saw some shit there that I will never forget

My mom gave me a stern talking to before she went inside: speak to no one, do not leave the car, she would be in and out

As she walked through the doors, a young man and woman were walking out

They were speaking as if they knew each other while they walked back to their cars that had been parked at the gas pumps

He grabbed her arm and lead her over to his van, in my throat there was a massive lump

Because as she turned and started to walk away, he grabbed her and threw her into the open door

The car was already moving as he hopped in too and pushed her to the floor

I watched the car speed out of the parking lot and started dialing 9-11

My mom got back in our car and I told her I had seen a man kidnap someone

She took my phone out of my hand before I could make the call

She reminded me I was on drugs and that I probably hadn’t seen anything at all.

I told her it looked real and that that girl had looked so scared, what if I was the only one who knew what happened?

They did it so fast, no one else saw it. At least, nobody else had reacted

But I wasn’t allowed to because if any police officers were to see me and speak to me they would immediately recognize that I was on something

They’d be pissed off that I was getting them worried about nothing

I was nothing more than a fifteen year old high out of their mind, why would they listen to me anyway?

Did I want to call the police so they could throw me into rehab straight away?

Or somehow get the two of us into trouble with the law?

There was no way to justify, prove, or accept what I saw.

So instead we drove home and my mom said we would check the news tomorrow and see if anything had been reported

But for now, all we could do was wait for me to come down because I needed to get my shit sorted

We spent the rest of the night chain-smoking together while I cried

But when I told my mom that I didn’t want to do drugs ever again, I lied.

A week or two later, I got caught stealing pills from the grocery store she worked at

They fell out of my pants in the parking lot, my sister pointed them out, and oh boy, I have never seen my mom look so mad.

She screamed at me the entire car ride home, talking about how if I had been caught shoplifting it would ruin her reputation

If she lost her job there, what would she be able to do about the situation?

Did I have no respect for her, my family, or the problems I could have caused?

What was the point of spending three and a half months in the hospital if I wasn’t going to stop?

I was wasting my life away

She didn’t know what else she could say.

Did I want to be a person that no one could ever trust?

Did I want to be a person that made it hard to be loved?

Where I was heading was a life of crime and likely jail

She was angrier than a July thunderstorm hurling golf-ball sized hail

She had already had to help raise two druggies

Did I want to be just another junkie?

Another fucking statistic? Was I just waiting for the day I actually overdosed?

“Between your family, your friends, your life, and your drugs: Who do you love the most?”

So I wrote and signed a contract saying I wanted to be more than a drug addict

And after one last relapse a few weeks later, I finally kicked the habit.

It’s a heartbreaking thing to be standing in your mother’s room and seeing it in her body language and in her eyes that she is absolutely exhausted from having to beg her child to understand that their life is worth living

I’m sure I broke her heart a thousand times, I don’t know how she kept on being so forgiving

But that day was one of the first times I realized how I was seen in the world:

Just another fucked up girl

If my mother could look at me and ask if all I wanted her to see was a junkie,

Then what did everyone else in the world see?

I didn’t want to be a neighborhood crackhead that hangs out at the gas station, that wasn’t going to be me

I made that decision when for a split second, I saw my reflection in my mom’s eyes and that was all I could see:

An addict.