Everything I had ever stood for came crashing down beneath my bare feet as I pounded on her door and was finally let in. She was drunk and Mary poised over the entrance to the bathroom, fruitlessly blocking my view.
"Sniff."
I wasn't an idiot.
I knew what I was doing, I can't lie about that. I'd done it before, again and again, few more months off my life. I knew what I was doing and yet I didn't at the same time.
Everything became hazy after that.
"Five bucks for a gummer."
I wanted to laugh, and I did.
She fumbled through the drawer in drunken stupor, in her tight fitted dress that cut entirely too low in the front with her little tiara bobbing on her head. She knew and I knew it was always going to become more than that.
We'd been side-by-side since my dawning new life back in high school. She was the punker b***h that was half-a** dressed out for P.E., the red dye on her side-swept bangs, excessive eyeliner and red leopard print pants. My nitch was found in her.
We strut backless shirts around school thinking we led everything and nothing as freshmen who didn't take s**t. Crude and rude, we tore up the planks sophomore year, dressed extravagant for the attention of the teens; gothed out in buckle-up boots up to our knees, fishnet tops that showed dangerous cleavage, spiked collars and attitude to piss off the campus police.
...Or the raver days we had, of candy bracelets and a multitude of mini-buns I twisted up in her hair to look like nullified spikes (think Pinhead from Hellraiser), and me with my neon orange teddy bear backpack immaturely named Binky (a double-standard to the name; ravers would understand). We always turned heads, whether for good or bad. The world was ours.
We rolled into the party scene like something out of a Marilyn Manson video - it was there the journey really began. At 14, we were out 'til 2 AM (because her mother was too drunk), smoking and drinking and experiencing 'boys' for the first real time. Her girl Kelly was there too - that's when the drugs came in.
Six years of life dedicated to one fiesta after the next, playing with people far older than us because, some how, we managed to tag along with them. We stuck by each other through thick and thin, got each other into trouble and pulled each other back out, one late night after the next. We cried and laughed, passed out shitfaced in the same bed and ridiculed our new 'boytoy' of the month. We talked for hours about anything, sat in silence in contentment. It was bliss, this scene, even the worst of times.
She stood before me now with that mocking giggle and coy grin, a devious light in her eyes as if we were still 14, going to raves or going to see Kelly and Ron. Her finger dove into the bag and shot into my mouth. The first blow, it was on my gums. Here we go again.
Ron was a person no one would forget. Kelly and Ron, me and Chantal; for a long time, that's how it was. His heart was huge, with that charming gaze and lips to con anyone into anything. He spoke softly and yet there was an irresistable fire in his eyes that made you stand up for what you believed in. He was an anarchist gutter-punk to the core, yet he spoke and thought sensibly where the others did not. He told the story of life with his hands, his actions, with every word. While he was not handsome by most means, his charisma pulled people in like a moth to a flame.
Ron fell into drugs over the years, and Kelly ran into the night with him, living on the streets, hope in her heart. These weren't cute high-school flingtimes, either. No, this was the white widow, the candy, the stinger, the cooked pills in the back of someone's shed. This was their highlife, and everyone else's nightmare.
I was in 'my room' at Chantal's, drawing the same little things HE used to draw. I'd blazed a bowl of Purple chronic to myself with 'Ideoteque' by Radiohead on repeat in the background, then the world split in two.
"Ron is dying," she burst in the room. Incredulous - there are no words to describe what happened that night. I'd never seen a corpse until that moment, though. (To describe all the little horrors that happened during this phase of my life would take a novel to explain, really...)
Ron had O.D'd on heroin and left Kelly alone in the world, left her with coke and meth and no direction at 17 years old.
My mouth was numb.
She was cutting more over the mirror. Plastic in the nose; so went the rest of it. Only after that had I thought of Ron, of Dustin - my ex, the man I almost married, an ex-meth addict himself - of Marissa, who fell to meth too and lost everything she had and wound up with a crackbaby, of Ian, who spent part of his life as someone else under the hooks of the white snow, and now of Chantal, who stood corrupt and irresolute before me, slinging her bottle of Jager around.
Then I really knew what I had done, where I was going, what I could lose this time. I'd swallowed shots of Jager and multiple beers and a bowl of Purple just beofre this. My throat went dry and I started to sweat. Why did I just do that?
I tried to sleep, for work came at 7 AM and it was 3:30 AM. I tried, but HE wouldn't let me. The drunken fool in the house scared me more than I already was afraid of my own end. I thought my heart would burst in my chest. I said nothing audible to him, I just looked away. I'd asked for this, I determined, yet I was relieved when Mary and two others broke into the room and pulled him out. Thank God, I was safe.
Sort of...
That night never ended. Dawn came and to work I went with Chantal beside me, looking like a mutilated zombie. Inwardly I cried as I finally became sober... in the back I nearly broke down, but held on.
I had asked for this.
I did this to myself.
I couldn't look in a mirror - I wouldn't. I knew I looked hollow and forlorn, just like the other crack-addicts on the street. For the first time, I felt true shame.
I couldn't bottle it in, and I had to tell someone, someone I could trust; so I did when I got home.
I thought, after our conversation, that this was it, this was the next person I would lose, and it cut deeper than I ever thought it would. I deserved this.
I finally lost it on Ventrilo when there was no response, and yet through that endless dark someone else was there. I couldn't speak, I could only cry, and not in search of pity, I cried for myself.
Reality slapped me in a different way that night. I was blessed to be alive, and blessed that this time, I didn't lose someone, but enough is enough. That terror told me all I needed to know and feel.
I came to the conclusion that this way of life had to come to an end, before I lose myself as so many others have. I realize that those I surround myself with only wish to see me slip under the tide with them. They want to add another to the bottom of thisocean they call the drug world, for comfort of their own actions, for the feeling that they are not alone with their addictions.
Truth is, they are.
They will always be alone at heart, beneath the game of life and death.
While I intend to walk away from the sorrows of seeing so many fall short, I know I will look back and see her, the girl that, in some ways, had become my sister through all the suffering of the 'fast lane.' She will always be my girl, even if I watch her slip off the deep end.
We've been through so much together and yet I know that this will be one hurdle in life that I will not leap over with her. I'd fallen far enough down the well, it's a wonder that anyone was able to pull me back out...
So my greatest thanks to those who have, those who've watched me stumble time and again, who'd lie awake those painstaking nights wondering if I would see the next day, and those who saw through my flaws, never left my side, had the courage and patience to help me back to my feet.
I would give them the world if I could, but since I can't, I give them a soulful promise to never turn back, for the sake of myself and for my bonds to people I now realize mean more to me than any temporary high-relief in this place...
Ryli Orion Community Member 
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