Day 4,381

Dear Florence, 

I wanted to write to you to tell you my story. The whole thing and the one I never had the chance to tell you before. I hated being in there but I loved being in there with you. I wish you could have stayed a bit longer, or known that the outcome wouldn’t be as scary as the income was. I'm sorry that this is getting to you too late but, I wanted it to get to you at all, so here it goes: 

They caught up with me on a Tuesday. My body was a dead giveaway by giving out on the abandoned hallway floor of my high school during first period. It was still early in the morning before I had time to properly hydrate and cooperate with the my morning doses. I first realized I had fainted when one my of favorite teachers found me in that state of frozen bliss. I sometimes used to wish that the story ended there but it didn't. I realized I was on the floor because my butt was suddenly very cold and that was due to the tiles being underneath all of me instead of just my shoes. I was relieved though, when I realized it was Mr. Jacobs, a teacher I actually liked. But as it goes with passing out, you tend to go in and out, and in again, so while I had fallen inwards for the second time more people approached the scene of the crime. When I next opened my eyes I was surrounded by wolves that took the form of other faculty members, those that I wasn’t quite as fond of no, not at all. I decided to fall in again and when I next opened my eyes I was being scooted away in a wheelchair. A fucking wheelchair! Are you kidding me? And just wait, because it gets worse… Since I attended a privileged, private, and religious high school, my fainting and my behavior as a whole was entirely out of the ordinary. I don’t think they even had a 'code purple' until they weren’t sure what to call what happened to me. So it went out and over the loudspeakers to the entire student body:

"Code Purple! Stay in your classrooms until the Code Purple is complete and you hear the sound of the bell." Which also meant every single student had the perfect view from our all-window-walls school to watch me being hauled from my wheelchair into the ambulance that awaited to take me to the nearby emergency room to officially diagnose me as ‘fucked up’. Couldn’t they tell I was just dehydrated? They put the sirens on and everything.

Talk about dramatic.

I wanted to cry but instead I fell in, again. I stayed in until they wheeled me out of the ambulance and into the hallway of the emergency room where I must have waited for two hours to get a room and to be examined by a doctor. Because this wasn’t an emergency, can’t you see? At that point I was more annoyed than anything else. Annoyed that my school did this to me, annoyed that truthfully I did this to me, but, not annoyed that I took my morning Percocets that were not necessarily prescribed to me by a psychiatrist but rather, my friend who has Crohn's and had been taking them for years so really I ask you, what's the difference? Above all I was simply annoyed I didn’t hydrate and eat my bag of Cheerio's fast enough to hold it inside of me. I wondered then how I could be so careless. And now finally, annoyed that all of my hard work would soon be over. Spoiled. Ruined. Exposed. I was a drug addict in the making and they knew it.

Although I was in my senior year, I was still only seventeen so this meant My Mother would have to come in and sign me out and also have full access to read over the report of what lived inside my system. Emphasis on the 'my'. This was my secret, my haven and my own personal hell which I enjoyed very, very much and would miss all the same. I felt anger and guilt. Anger towards the wolves who put me in here, and guilt for My Mother who would have to retrieve me from here. That was when I first wished that when I fainted and hit the ground, I had hit my head hard enough to bleed out so as not to have to deal with the consequences of my own actions. I also wished this IV in my arm was hooked up to morphine for one final whirl. But it wasn’t. It was just the liquid I could have used hours ago and not now. Now I didn't care. I knew what came next and it was the last thing I wanted to embrace. Sobriety against my will. I knew I would never be able to truly be ‘me’ again. Me, from my own creation, the drug addicted, the self induced psychiatric patient of my own design. I loved this version of me because this version of me could do no wrong when I’ve already done it all. Now comes the hard part. Now comes the time where I have to start to try and I dreaded this idea of trying very much. 

when My Mother finally arrived I had been in the hospital for nearly five hours. Its not her fault, she had to work two jobs just to afford my privilege and private life. I felt terrible for showing her just how much I didn’t appreciate any of it, at all. I wished to God I wasn’t like this. My Mother comforted me and asked if I was okay. That question alone broke my heart because despite everything I did and, all the ways I knew I let her down, she still granted me the right to this question and my lie of an answer.

"I'm okay" I said.

She then asked what all of these things were that came up in my system test that she had never heard of, my pure and straight arrow Mother who never touched a drug a day in her life. I slowly went through the list of the nine different treasure findings in my network. There was THC that was obvious of course, and alcohol we all could have predicted that too, then sedatives, methamphetamine from a Ritalin I stole from my friends little bother, my prescribed Zoloft, my unprescribed Percocet along with fentanyl (not sure where that came from but probably from the), cocaine which was already five days ago I was surprised that still showed, and alas, one other downer which deserved it's namesake now. She asked if I was okay despite what my report showed and for that I am so grateful she’s My Mom. No one else would have given me that kind of courtesy. She told me how we would get through this together but she also meant sober which I couldn’t imagine. I told her that I knew even though I didn’t and, in that moment a soft broken stringed song started to play somewhere lost inside my soul. And I didn’t want to find it. 

Once we were discharged I was also discharged by my school as they were ‘not equipped too handle this kind of a situation’. You mean teenagers? So it was inpatient for me and with inpatient there’s no chance of breaking the rules I felt so desperate to break. I just wanted to breath again the way I learned how to breath over the last year of my life. Shallow and close to death. I missed my pills, they made me feel more loved than a human or myself ever could. I missed touching my skin and feeling nothing. I missed watching people talk and hearing empty spaces where their vocals should be. I missed being alone and I missed myself most of all. Waking up each day in the presence of other people, especially ones in uniform, freaked me out. Drinking orange juice without champaign didn’t taste right to me either. Food was forced because I had grown so unhungry in the last year of my life. I missed the life I had fabricated for myself when I was in full control despite what it looked like to the outside world. I knew what was going on inside and isn’t that what matters most, feeling content within yourself? I wondered how I would ever get that back again, if I would ever get that back again. I missed My Mother too, and her wide compassion, the safety of living in her home and having my own bathroom to hangout in even if it was for way too long and not using the toilet by any means. My first week in the 'big house' they made me pee with the bathroom door open and someone inside with me but ‘not looking’. Yeah right. I had too much time and no way to waste it. I tried to talk to people, something I used to be so good at that I didn’t have to try. Now I tried way too hard and it probably showed because these conversations went nowhere and never happened twice with the same person. Except for you. I guess you can say I lost my touch. It was probably also because they put me in a section with adults. People who had been in and out of the system for years. They thought my profile was too high risk to put me in the teenage group. I guess kids in that section maybe smoked a little weed or got caught stealing their parents liquor and weren’t quite ‘at my level’. I was with the recovering Junkies and the only one who was in high school. It set me apart and made me stand out in the center all in one. But I guess that wasn’t a bad thing if thats also what made you notice me amongst the crowd. Or was it because we were sentenced on the same night? Whatever it was I want you to know how glad I am that you were there too.

It didn’t get better until it did. After about four months in the establishment and another four out of it, with weekly meetings and check-ups, I started to feel like myself again. Not the same self I once knew or even the one after that but, a new version of me that was currently being born. I liked her, me, kind of, and with time much much more. But still never as much as you did. I didn’t plan to stay sober when the meetings stopped but sober planned to stay in me because now it’s been twelve years and I look back only to remember to look forward again. And I wish you knew that it could have happened for you too. I don’t know how, but I know that it could have and that's what they call higher consciousness.

I miss you, my Friend. I think I’ll miss you forever. I hope it’s nice on the other side where you now are. I keep earning more and more coins but they're not for me, they are for you, for both of us because, I wouldn't have tried nearly as much as I did if you hadn’t stopped trying at all. I think when you lost your hope you gave it to me and its something I didn’t deserve and wouldn’t have accepted but here we are. Or here I am, alone, but we're doing it together. 4381 days later.

Your friend, 

Dafna