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I drank all day long. I took 30s when I could find them.
And when 30s proved too expensive as my addiction got worse, it was H.
I'll never use a needle.
Those were the words I said the first time I crushed up H and snorted it.
It was the same thing I said the second, third, twentieth, fiftieth time.
Then, sure, fuck it.
Eight months into that habit, I was tying off my arm and stabbing a needle into the vein- the rush through my system like no other feeling on earth. Nothing natural, I was convinced, could ever take its place.
I took a breath and moved the muzzle of the gun into my mouth, feeling it scrape across my teeth in an altogether too familiar way.
It wasn't as freaky, as surreal as it was the first time I did it.
The shock of what I was doing was long since gone.
It was just a decision- a weighing of pros and cons- a choice on whether there was enough to live for left.
And as I sat there, gaze moving to look at the picture of my dead mother, knowing there wasn't one fucking person left in the world who would even give a fuck if I was still around... I made a decision I had never made before, not even during the worst part of detox, not even when the pain had me screaming into my pillow for hours on end.
Not even then.
But as I sat there, my finger slid to the trigger.
And it pulled.
Click.
"What the fuck," I exploded, yanking it out of my mouth so fast that it ripped my lower lip open, opening the cylinder and dropping the bullets on the floor.
What. The. Fuck?
There was a dichotomy in the meetings between the counselors and the actual addicts.
Don't listen to what you have heard, the counselor once said, you don't have to hit rock bottom to get better.
No one contradicted him, but we all knew better. The only way you'd put yourself through the misery of losing the high was if things went so fucking south that there was nowhere further to fall.
Rock.
Fucking.
Bottom.
I don't think there was anything lower than pulling a trigger on a gun that had a thirty some-odd percent chance of killing you.
Thirty fucking percent.
I was so low that I was willing, in that moment, to take those chances.
I shot up off the bed, pacing the small space in my room, my skin electric, my brain swirling.
And all I could think was- I had to go.
This room had been my prison.
I had drank, snorted, shot up, puked, raged, screamed, and tried to fucking kill myself within the walls.
There was nothing left to do there.
I grabbed the gun with a fresh shirt, rubbing off my prints and tossing it in a garbage bag, taking it out to the hall and dropping it down the shoot before going back into my room, stuffing a handful of clothes and money into a bag along with a couple recovery books and the picture of my mom and zipping it up.
I took the first train out of the City- heading for Jersey.
And all through the ride, the words came back to me.
The strength to accept the things I can not change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
I could change the location. I could flip open a fresh page. I could be someone other than the piece of shit junkie with a dead mom and no one else to give a fuck. I could be a man who never thought about killing himself. I could be someone who started over.
"Next stop- Navesink Bank," the robotic voice called over the loudspeaker, jerking me out of my thoughts.
There had been at least eight other stops that had been called out before, none of which broke through the swirling mess of my brain.
But that one did.
Never really being the kind to believe in them, I somehow took it as a sign, grabbed my bag, stood up, and got off at the station in Navesink Bank.
I had expected water.
Navesink Bank... meaning the Navesink River.
But I stepped off into a nice-looking station in a sketchy area full of small mom-and-pop restaurants and several old abandoned warehouses.
With no idea what I was doing, but knowing there was no going back, I shrugged and moved forward.
Eventually I came up on it- the river, settled down near a restaurant and a hospital. The dock was long and dark, the lights ahead only half on. The boats rocked in the water. The dock groaned against the current. Across the river, mansions lined the water, lights on, blocking out a bit of the brightness of the stars above.
"If you're thinking of jumping," a deep voice said, making my head turn to find a man standing there in a three-piece suit, a watch on his wrist that was probably worth more than a year of my mother's salary growing up, tall, dark, intimidating.
