Chapter 5
I spent the next hour and a half in my room trying to calm myself down from everything that Sarah had just said to me and also trying to remove all of the haunting images from my mind that had followed when she mentioned Josh. I overdosed quite a bit on my medication that day, just trying to numb myself.
I knew that the drugs were unhealthy, but I didn't care, I was already all messed up on the inside as it was. I figured that anything that promised a break was worth a shot , since after all, I had nothing left to lose.
I had only purposely overdosed three other times before, and as much as I tried to refrain, I loved it. The simple state of not thinking about anything was beautiful to me, it felt like I was in a dream while I was awake. It was as if everything was fine and I would even be able to completely disregard the fact that I was violently shaking or that my heartbeat was racing rapidly. I just wished that it would never end because there was always massive migranes, nausia and extreme exhaustion that followed with every high. I always crashed pretty hard afterwards, but somedays it was just worth it.
If I had any less self control and if I didn't need to savor my pills for my daily doses, I honestly think that I would have done it much more frequently. I knew that the drugs were bad for me, I had witnessed first-hand how drugs had destroyed my dad's life and how that had left a huge impact on the rest of my family. I also still cared about the image that I portrayed of myself to the people at my school. While I was a laughing stock to Jordan and all of the other kids on the higher end of the popularity spectrum, I actually had a decent enough reputation amoung the underclass. As far as any of them knew, I was a generally upbeat and energetic kid that liked punk music, playing guitar and baseball. I always managed to put on my happy face for all of them. I was the kid who could always turn any situation into an oppertunity to joke around and just looked for every chance to have fun.
Those were all very accurate descriptions of me, and if you asked me to tell you about myself, I would have probably said those same things. But the battle between my personality and my depression was never ending, and behind closed doors my demons always won. I couldn't let people know how much I was actually hurting though, I didn't need more people judging me more than they already did.
I knew that if I let the drugs get the best of me that they may have ended up completely driving away the happy kid that I pretended to be which would leave me to be exposed and vulnerable to everyone and to be judged for the substance abuse. Besides, if I wasn't careful and my mom or Sarah found out that I abused drugs I would probably be disowned. They would view me as more of a failure than they already thought I was since I was following my father's example, and the last thing that I needed was another reason to hate myself.
I had thought over these consequences, as well as the toll that the drugs would take on my phsyical health probably thousands of times. I had thought over these things enough to know that I absolutely had to avoid making overdosing a regular habit of mine at all costs. But still some days I just couldn't resist the temptation of the escape it promised, and this made me more and more frightened every time.
Just as I was beginning to come down from my high I heard a really loud knock at my door. It took me a few seconds to process what was happening, but when I did realize what was happening I instantly panicked. I frantically reached to hide the pills and fell off of my bed in the process.
"Austin? Are you alright in there?" it took me a second to recognize that the voice belonged to Claire.
"Yeah," I laughed nervously "come in!' I slowly began to stand up. My head hurt like hell, and I wasn't fully sober yet at that point, but I was concious enough to know that I had to keep Claire from finding out that I had overdosed at all costs.
