My Story (part 1)

I’ll start off by saying, hi.. I’m Serenity and I am an addict. I wrote this out today on paper, but I’m going to share it here now… I am unscrewing the ends of my pen so careful not to trigger myself, why when life is so much better does my heart hurt so much? Depression and Loneliness wrap around me; as if they think their helping me. Their bodies weighing everything down… my legs feel as though I am lifting cinder blocks, one step at a time. My spirit entangled in what seems to be my past, struggling. Like a fly caught in a spider’s web, every move only solidifying it’s fate, it’s death.. The thing is, I know the people from my past don’t necessarily care about me. Yet, I appreciate those who gave me shelter, a bed even when they could barely do so for themselves, food when we all knew we didn’t have enough. Skeletal figures all surrounding a can or two of food bank beans… I’m grateful, that I had that, that wasn’t something all my people had. I loved them, I love them. Nobody, can tell me that “all an addict cares about is drugs” because I have lived in that hell first hand and we always kept who we could afloat, because we understood the alternatives. Blankets piled on concrete floors, trash of all shapes and sizes tower around me, my suitcase tucked away under a shelf that we all found outside. Praying that when I close my eyes that I’d wake up. Until the will you even live slithered away like a snake in the grass. Forget about the will, once that is gone the pain runs only to the eyes, not to be felt but only seen by those around you.Me? Nobody here understands just by looking at me that I had lost absolutely everything a human has, the people that check you over only to judge you based on how you appear to be. They’d never know, they’d never understand… They wouldn’t want too. If nobody knows just how far a person has come, if they haven’t lived with the downhill disease of addiction. HOW? Could they ever begin to understand? The smallest accomplishments are more than most, the biggest one’s are victories we may never take home again. I sit here scared of judgement by the ones closest in my life, wondering if my last slip up was the one that pushed them away or if it might be my next one. Have I already lost them? But, why? Why begin to try to understand that this isn’t easy, why? When you were lucky enough not to ever have too. I’m envious, I wish I wasn’t the character in this story, but I am! I do not know why when you are given two options that everything you’ve tried for wisps away and you’ve already made your choice. I don’t know why I ever pick up when I do, not before, during or after. I’m shackled to my addiction like a life sentence, or death.I don’t think holding all this inside me is okay, I can already feel depression and loneliness slipping off me, only to be left wondering if my relief is temporary, to find them both anchored to me. Waiting to pull me under, I wear I can hear the chain slowly unraveling as they sink under. I remember this feeling. I felt it for years and I still feel it now, screaming under water. Once you’ve faced death and survived you’d think you’d appreciate the little things in life… Sadly not everyone does, when I was actively using Fentanyl I died seven times in four years; and I still want to use. Most people would say “ you’re lucky to be alive” …

comment. Some of those times I thought would be it for me, two days in a row I write my suicide note. Nobody is home but me, I stand in the mirror loading my syringe, my last shot. I glance into the mirror at my shirt, it says HAPPY but my eyes say dead. I turn my shower on, the water is burning my skin as I get in… but at least I can feel something, I push the plunger in and as the dope hits me I can no longer feel the water; as I drop into a heap of human in the bottom of the bathtub, I say goodbye. I’m naked, my boyfriend is saying my name in a panic. He came home and found my lifeless body in the tub, the water still going but freezing cold. My body is stiff, a pale shade of blue. He Narcans me, and now I’m here having to explain my suicide note to the one person I was leaving behind. The next day.I try again, he brings me back. He’s upset this time, mostly frustration. “Why is your life so bad that you want to die?” He doesn’t understand; mystery dreams are haunted with his purple lips, his eyes popping out of his head as if eyelids never existed at all, his blue skin slipping into a violet as the time slowly disappears. I come home from work, already in a panic, he hasn’t come to meet me. My heart is sinking, I am running the fastest I can, tears flying in every direction; I can’t breath. He is sitting, back to to the door when I walk in…He doesn’t move, I know exactly what. Panic floods over my body, this is the man I love, this is my soulmate. I pray to a god I’ve never spoken to before, I beg him not to take him, not yet. I’m blowing air into his lungs, only to have it blow back at me. I’m doing CPR, I catch my dog in the corner of the room mortified. I’M SORRY! I’m sorry … He gasps for life itself, I watched his wide open eyes go from lifeless to alive. I won’t ever forget that.My friend overdoses and dies, when I found out I realized that he died on Overdose Awareness Day. He wasn’t found for three days, when he is his brother finds him holding nothing but his hooter; almost as if he was ready for the next. “It’s never going to happen to you.” Fentanyl whispers into your ear as the next hit you take, takes you. (R.I.P Dylan, I miss you. I’m sorry)Now I’m only left to google Overdose Awareness Day and hope I find who sold him some of the “good shit.” (I am an addict after all.) A picture still fresh in my mind pops up on my screen, I’m shocked at what I’m seeing but I stay focused on the message for a long time… It is a picture of a couple in a vehicle, both of them are dead; the one in the driver’s seat is slumped over to the side, mouth at an indescribable angle, his skin a soft blue/green. The passenger seat sits a woman, her skin is also a sad shade of blue… The back middle seat, a boy sits; waiting for his Mother and Father to wake up. They won’t. Look it up, it will show you how real this really is. I’m doing another shot, how did I get here? Wondering how IV fentanyl use has become the normal for me. I know at this point I will die, probably in a similar fashion as Dylan or those two parents who left their baby. I have accepted that, that is okay. I finish my shot, I’m now hobbling around at a slight ninety degree angle the noise of the needle hitting the floor wakes me for a moment; stumbling until I find the couch to slump over on. I’m out. My boyfriend wakes me up, I can’t tell you one or the other if he was checking on me or if he was asking for drugs. My mind wants to believe he was checking on me… But, I’m an addict, and I know he wasn’t. My phone rings as I write this, but I know what is more important and it’s this. I try even now to have a positive outlook on life. I guess I am my Mother’a Daughter, refusing to see the bad in people until they’ve shown you too many times to ignore. Even after all of this, I see no evil, I hear no evil because I know what it does to a soul so beautiful… so fast. My ears ringing now sweet with memories of souls long lost. Comeback! They can’t, they won’t, they don’t.

-Serenity Webb