The Forgotten One

6 - TJS

"The beautiful thing about getting high
is that time ceases to exist,"
- Rue Bennett

♡

I'll always remember the fear in my voice when I rang my dad that night- I felt like a little boy: terrified, and wishing for his parent to save him.

I'll also always remember the fear in my dads voice when he demanded my location. He was frantic,
something I'd never heard from him before. Even in all of our arguments during the height of my mum's illness, and the aftermath of her death, he never once sounded frantic. Angry. Frustrated. And, even defeated. But never frantic.

The man on the phone to me didn't even sound like my dad. He sounded like a different person- someone equally as terrified as me. Someone clinging on to the relationship with his son that he'd fucked up years before. I think he knew- knew he was so close to losing everything. Knew his chance of change and redemption was about to overdose. 

I felt like I'd been suffocating- drowning. I tried hard to find a cure, was willing to do anything to break the surface of the water. Nothing worked. Nothing provided me with the oxygen I was looking for- the oxygen tainted with poison. The oxygen reserved for those who had taken too many wrong turns- the oxygen that was capable of destroying the lives of those who inhaled it.

I found it in a bag. A bag filled with white powder. A bag that I knew I'd been charged too much for- the tax that was added to dance on the alluring line between life and death.

Cocaine.

I knew it was dangerous. I always had. My mum had been vehemently against drugs her entire life- my entire life. But she was gone now. I had no reason to stay away from it- I'd done it before. Countless times before, even. And the first being the night before she died, when I resented her for the imminency of her death. I did the one thing I knew she would be disappointed in me for.

I closed one nostril, inhaled through the other- and I breathed. I breathed for the first time since she got ill. I felt alive. Happy. Euphoric. It was clear to me, in that moment, why it was so easy to become addicted.

I couldn't understand how anyone escaped it, permanently unscathed- how they decided they'd only do it once, and then stick with it.

That was until everything got too loud again. The come down- something that isn't nearly as glamorised by the media as the high. I hated myself. Hated myself for doing something to spite my mother when she tried so hard not to leave me- fought her cancer with everything she had. Hated myself for succumbing to something as an easy way out. Hated myself for how shit I felt after; it was like all of my worst hangovers rolled into one.

But then my thoughts got too much. Too loud. Too volatile. And in that moment, I knew the come down would be worth it. I knew the high would satiate my demons, if only temporarily.

So I did it again- another party. Another night I spent out with countless missed calls from my dad and Joe. Even then, I knew I should have felt bad for them, but I couldn't bring myself to. They'd never been in my situation, so how could they judge how I decided to cope?

But it didn't stop at that. Didn't stop as an occasional high at a party. I was doing it whenever I could. I was so high, even, during her funeral, that my dad forced me to wear sunglasses and had to stand close enough to catch me the entire time. But, in my mind, it was worth it.