Paper Stars

13

Charlotte Hollins
Before---3 years ago
Riverside Rehabilitation Center
The first week is the worst. Withdrawal symptoms condemn me to days without sleep, lying in my assigned bed drenched in cold sweat and vomiting until I've forgotten how to swallow. The nurses come in periodically to empty my puke-filled bucket and refresh the damp cloth on my forehead. Every time they come in I beg for something, any kind of medication to ease the chaos wracking my body. And every time, the nurse just smiles and pats my arm and says the same thing.
"We have to get the toxins out of your system."
What they don't realize is that this entire facility is toxic. The white walls and the anti-drug posters, the patients with their dead eyes, the constant medicinal scent mixed in with the stench of obsession and addiction. Everything here is poisonous, and it's slowly killing us all. Before long, we'll all be ghosts, because the drugs were the only thing that ever made us human.
After about 8 days of detox, my system is clean. It's not as refreshing as those recovered drug addicts make it seem. In fact, it's about 20 times worse. Instead of feeling healthy or strong, like those pamphlets said, I feel even worse than I did to begin with. My source of strength was the drugs, and now that it's gone I just feel...weak. I feel like I've been cut open and all of my power has been sucked out with a straw. I can hardly walk without using the wall as a guide, and when I look at the world, the colors are duller and less vibrant. Everything is a little more grey. I've been vaporized and now I am a ghost like everybody else.
They assign me a therapist, a nice lady with a big smile who's a little less ghost-like that everybody else here. Her name is Dr. Rodriguez, and I visit her once a day at 2:00 pm sharp. She asks me the same questions every time I visit her.
"How have you been feeling?"
"What have you been thinking about?"
Her favorite thing to say is, "I can't help you unless you let me, Charlie."
She doesn't know how hard I'm trying to let her.
In my rehab support group we've been discussing coping methods frequently of the late. One of the kids, a nice 14 year old girl named Andie who was a heroin junkie, talks about how she keeps her hands busy by tying knots in a long segment of string. The supervisor agreed with her and said that the best forms of distraction for recovering addicts were crafts and exercising. Thanks to Dr. Rodriguez, I'd already begun jogging on the indoor treadmills in the rehab gym, but it wasn't enough to break through the film of haze that painted my brain. I started visiting the crafts room and flipping through the books of suggested activities. When I first arrived at rehab, I was hesitant to even step foot in the room; though a lot of admits visited the room, it was always dead silent, the only sound being the flipping of pages or scissors cutting through paper or a stamp being wet with ink. It gave me the chills.
After three days of just flipping through craft-books, I find one that caught my eye. It is a 7 step craft that involves taking a long, thin strip of paper and completing a series of simple folds. The end result is a paper star that fits easily into the center of my palm. It isn't very big or particularly flashy, like some of the crafts the other admits complete, but it's was comforting to make and it distracts me from the haze in my head, even if it is just for a little while.
I begin visiting the craft room more often, and I sit in the corner of the room on the beanbag chairs and make my stars until the bell rang for bedtime. Before long, that isn't enough. I start cutting tens and tens of long strips of paper and tucking them into my waistband so that they are there at a moments notice, ready whenever the haze gets thicker or the dark thoughts come. I lay awake at night and make stars in the dark, not needing light because my fingers already know what to do. The paper stars are my obsession.
Dr. Rodriguez notices whenever I take the slices of paper to my sessions. She still asks me the same questions and I still answer the same, my fingers busily making folds in the paper.
One day she folds her hands and leans over her desk, smiling at me. "Charlie, what do you do with all of those stars that you make?"
I glance down. So far I've made a decent handful of stars in the half an hour that I've been sitting in Dr. Rodriguez's office. "I got jars from the craft room. I've filled up three of them so far. They're under my bed."
She positions her pen on her notepad. "How do those stars make you feel?"
The question ricochets against my brain and I'm rendered speechless. I decide that a simple shrug will do for an answer.
Dr. Rodriguez clicks her pen. "Do you feel happy?"
"No."
"What do you feel?"
"I feel..." My fingers twitch and the incomplete paper star falls from my hands and bounces delicately on the carpet. Carpet floors. I heard a member of the staff talking about it. They said that carpet flooring makes people want to kill themselves less. "I feel cleaner."