HERE GOES:
this time last year i was married, with two cats (cheeseburger and sylvia), in an apartment in south van. i still have my wedding ring, and my engagement ring. i remember how strange it felt to not have them on after it ended. i still have them, in a box on my parents' bookshelf.
my life has changed so much. i never thought i would ever move back in with my parents. when i had no other choice i even fought it. i slept in the hospital for two days just to not have to face being enough of a loser to have to move back in with the folks. but waking up alone in a hospital bed, with no friends to speak of, an alienated family, and finally no husband, left me with no choice. i came home.
and i am so glad i did. as degrassi as it sounds. i spent two weeks sweating and crying in a makeshift bed on the floor of my parents' house, under my mom's drafting board, begging for either a swift death in my sleep, or to have my shitty, shitty husband back.
flash forward to today: since then (june 2009) i have had four life threatening heroin overdoses. this is while i've been trying to be clean. the first was a week after the break-up, and i had only been clean for a week at that point. i guess it's the most understandable. young adult faces breakup and is too much of a pussy to just be sad for a month or two. the other three are bullshit, and a result of me trying to live guilt-free from my shitty, shitty gross drug problems. there is nothing worse than waking up to paramedics shoving tubes down your throat after injecting you with narcan and fitting you with a ventilator because you can't breathe on your own, while you see your parents fuzz in and fuzz out in the foreground, not crying anymore because it's become routine and almost boring. eyes rolling, heads shaking, etc.
twice i have technically died this year. twice i have been non-responsive with no signs of breathing. so thats kind of four of my nine lives. relapse deaths are the easiest, i guess. if i were some higher power i'd probably want to wipe out a 21 year old living with their parents and sneaking drugs, too. it makes sense.
but today, at least, i am ok. i have not used heroin since my last overdose, and i went back to school. i'm not exactly happy, but the things that make me happy take up the time that drugs used to. i sit in my room and play guitar all day, sometimes for days at a stretch. sleep here and there, eat leftovers standing up. i have become a master at multi tasking because of this. one handed typing between notes, sandwich on amp. basically i am 12 again. when i'm not doing that i hang out with andrea, and that is one of the most comforting things in the world. it takes me back to when i was a kid, when the both of us made plans on living in a spray painted tour bus and travel across the universe.
i guess my christmas message is that having an awesome best friend can kind of save your life, whether it be a guitar or some silly serbian that finds all your jokes funny. the fact that i could come back after over two years of completely disappearing still surprises me. and makes me so overwhelmed by how great my remaining friends are. oh, uh, and my parents, you know - those people that muscled their way through the unspeakable pain i put them through, just to give me a place - rent free! - to live in for as long as it takes me to become a functional, relapse-free adult. to have people that will do their best to protect you, and be there for you after you've dropped off the radar because crack and heroin ft. a shitty husband seemed way more...necessary? - is insane. and to look back and think that those things were actually more important, more integral to me being able to get up in the morning...makes me so sad. i lost a lot of time. i miss the years that i never got to actually live because i was standing in some alley doing alley-related things. i miss my teenage years! and the first part of my twenties. but i guess the best option i have right now is to white out the shitty parts of my life, because i can't reel the tape back.
don't do drugs, kids. or at least have a friend that will stay with you after you get clean. i ruined my life from age fourteen on. but i got (mostly) clean seven months ago, and by some luck of the draw a few of my oldest friends came back into my life. my parents did, too. and one of them even had christmas at my parents house. plus beer. that's a total fucking win-win. i got my parents back, my best friend, and there was beer. and the lil' wayne documentary.
i think that's a sob story worth sharing. slob story.
merry two days after christmas-mas. don't ever think i'm not thankful for how my life turned around and brought me turkey and beer as opposed to jail and situations too shitty to even mention.
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