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Prologue

     Something inside of me is dead. I don't know what it is or when exactly it died. All I know is that I'm missing something big and it has left me with a hole that can only be temporarily filled. I first started filling the void with people. I thought I could distract myself with other people's distractions, but realized quickly that letting in others only made the hole inside of me deeper. When I was fourteen I tried to fill the blank space with liquor. It worked, temporarily of course. The alcohol in my system would fade off and I'd face reality again. At sixteen I tried drugs. They worked wonders as long as I was under their influence. Not only did they take me away, but they gave me the good emotions too, the things I lacked. I started with pot and slowly made my way up to pills. By the age of eighteen I had developed a system of all three substitutes. Mornings I would take two Oxy's to lift my mood and get rid of my anxiety, pouring myself some Moscato into a water bottle to drink throughout the day. Afternoons I would take a Hydrocodone once the Oxy's wore off. Because it is less effective than the Oxycotin, I tend to drink most of my Moscato with my lunch. At night I take De to help me sleep, that is, if It's sleeping that I am doing. It's rare that I spend my nights home. Most nights I am out with my friends and my girlfriend Jenna. Together we do party drugs like Cocaine and Ecstasy.

     Today I am twenty-five, but it feels like an ordinary day. I live in a small apartment that I share with my girlfriend. I hang out with the same crew and follow the same schedule. My parents kicked me out before I turned nineteen because I walked out of rehab twice.

     I do not believe in God anymore. I stopped believing at the age of sixteen on Sunday June 10th, 2005 while I was sitting in a pew at church and the priest spoke of sin. Every characteristic I had known of myself at the time was listed in the New Testament. I was an Abuser of Self, deceitful, had evil thoughts, I was fearful, had premarital sex, and the list just goes on and on. As I sat there I thought to myself that I was surely damned for I had committed almost every sin in the book, then the idea of "does any of this even fucking matter?" arose and I dismissed the idea of god with the reason being that if he was real, there would only be one religion. I believe that our actions do not determine our fate and we are free to do as we wish in our lives.

     With no religion to save me, no pleasant emotions to rely on, and nothing that turned merely surviving into living, I depend on my substances to save me. I move along a step behind everybody else as I try to understand the world. I fake every human interaction. I'm not even sure if I love Jenna or not because I don't understand how love would feel. I only understand the painful things and I try to forget about those feelings.

I'm dead, but I must be concealing it well because nobody seems to notice.