Pocket

The story of my life has been one of drugs. Most people spend about eight hours a day working, another 1 hour or so commuting, 8 sleeping and what’s left goes to their hobbies and family, the things that help define a person. I’ve spent the past 6 years of my life devoting my time to finding, using and trying to afford the drugs that I thought of as my entire life. My family had distanced themselves from me years ago, and who could blame them after all I did. 

The lying and thieving that had all gotten so reckless. It started small, pocketing a couple pills from a medicine cabinet when I could but I eventually got so desperate I heaved up a gallon jug filled with change and ran jingling out the door. I wound up seeing my local police more than I had seen my own Mother in the past two years.

My Mom never gave up on me like the others did. Despite what she knew, she always loved me and treated me like her little girl. So many times she was brought to tears by the drug hazed state I showed up in. When I found out she was sick, I had to schedule seeing her in the hospital around when I knew my family members wouldn’t be there. Otherwise I would be met with their uptown looks and vicious accusations about some stolen jewelry or a missing piggy bank from their kid’s room. Every misplaced bobby pin was my fault, but in their defense if bobby pins could buy me heroin I would have taken every one.

The day she died, I don’t even know what I was doing. Time was slippery when your brain was either wrapped in a drug warmed blanket or begging in a corner like a sick dog. After months I mustered up the courage and went to see her but was given the news that she had died nearly thirty days earlier. The time I should have spent grieving over my mother and helping her through her illness I spent chasing happiness in a bag.

I later heard my Aunts tried to contact me but they only had vague ideas of where I spent my time and no phone number to reach me on. I missed her wake and her funeral. I missed all the stories about her life before I was born, the tears and all the hugs. But all that is behind me now.

           That day at the hospital I gave it all up. I found an outreach center and got a room at the Moon Island Rehab Clinic in Quincy. Ten days of withdrawals, ten days of speaking to nobody and crying and then forty days of actual therapy and reconciliation with my actions and my addiction. I’m leaving that place now and for the first time I dare to re-enter the world.

           Before I left the island I called my Aunt and heard my childhood home was being sold. She made sure to flaunt that the house was left to her and that I wouldn’t see a dime of the money. Not a problem, this was expected. None the less I had some things to take before it was sold so I planned a visit.

           My key to the front door was useless and instead was opened by the Aunt I had spoken to earlier. I hadn’t tried that key in years but always hoped it would work if I ever needed it.

My Aunt of course would be supervising whatever I was going to take. Evidently her trust in me as short as her greeting, a grunt and a single succinct nod the kind you might give a pedestrian in the crosswalk, cold and parting.

           I wanted to go to my room and look through my old clothes. It smelled stale but the pink walls surrounding my vanity mirror and stuffed bears still looked like someone loved the little girl that slept here. I stared back at my worn expression in the mirror and felt like an invader in some precious girl’s room. I had brought only my backpack which contained all I owned. Nothing more than a few pairs of socks and underwear, a box of rehab issued cardboard tampons and some pamphlets. Only the things I still had because nobody would buy them.

Ties a pair of scuffed Converse sneakers to a loop on my bag, and took a few pairs of worn jeans and a couple band T-shirts which was all I could fit in the bag. What I wanted most though was my old green trench coat.

I had worn it so many times it was perfectly broken in and still fit me just fine. I grabbed the lapels and pulled one over my nose, the faint cigarette smell from my mother’s Pall Malls still clinging to the fibers. I swam in the smell, moving my hands over the perfectly matted polyester remembering it shape. The missing button on the breast pocket from when my mother grabbed me after I nodded off at the dinner table and tried to leave. The burn hole on the collar when I had stolen one of her cigarettes and fell asleep on the couch, lit butt in my mouth. It fell and scorched an almost perfect circle on the collar, it’s a wonder why it didn’t go up in flames and kill us both. I crammed the clothes into my bag and kept the jacket on as I walked out the door, this was all I was allowed of my mother’s legacy, and all I could carry.

I left my childhood home for the last time without a goodbye or any other pleasantry from my Aunt she surely would have afforded to anyone else. It was as if a ghost let me out and shut the door behind me. This kind of treatment wasn’t anything new but now I didn’t have the drugs to soften it this time.

I had to walk another two miles to catch a train into the city. There was a half-way house on Albany Street I would be staying at until I could figure out something more permanent. I started my journey, my bones aching from all the walking I had already done until to my relief, I saw a bus stop. Knowing I would need the only five dollars I had for my train ride later on, I realized I might have enough change in the pockets of my newly acquired clothes to afford the $1.25 bus ride.

I checked the jeans in my bag but found only a quarter. I checked my jacket, the lower two came up empty and the inside pocket only had a receipt and a fortune cookie note which I tossed to the side of the road. But when I reached in my breast pocket, the one missing the button, I felt more than just the lone crisp dollar to complete my fare. I felt a familiar small bag.

The thin plastic licked at my index finger like a lonely dog greeting its owner. I started to shake. It started at my scalp, to my jaw, to my arms and ended past my feet. No it couldn’t be possible, I thought, shaking my head like someone waking from a nightmare to find blood on their hands. I forgot birthdays, I forgot court dates and appointments, I never forgot drugs. I reached into the pocket as if it may bite me and let out a whimper as I felt what I knew couldn’t really be there. A tied off corner of a plastic grocery bag with a pinky tip sized ball of white powder at the end, my own personal devil facelessly staring back through me.

I drew my head back and turned from the bag in my now cold and sweating hand trying to quell the panic churning inside me. Fighting against every cry from my aching body to visit that old familiar friend. The one I knew was always there for me and always brought whatever I needed. I threw it away into the gutter and sprinted towards the bus stop trying to forget where it had landed. I was met with the boring gazes of those who were already waiting and stood leaning on the glass breathing heavier than the run had warranted rocking my head along to each measured exhale. Only a few more minutes until my chariot would take me away from this tainted street.

Soon enough the heavenly hiss of gas brakes arrived. I boarded the bus and sat alone under the grimy humming lights in the back. As soon as the bus pulled away I let out a sigh of relief as each second put more and more distance between me and my impulses.

After maybe one minute or an hour, I started to calm myself. It can’t hurt me anymore, this isn’t like before, I’m different now I muttered to myself. Probably sounding crazy to the few people seated around me. No big deal to them though just another person who they had to ignore.

After one of the stops the driver turned around to me and more polite than was required stated I hadn’t paid my fare on the way in. I must have just rushed onto the bus forgetting to drop my fare in the box.

“Sorry I was just… well afraid. I must have forgotten when I rushed in.” I said in what was truly an apologetic tone, one I hadn’t had the cause to use in a long time. I walked up to the front and reached in my breast pocket to fish out the dollar when I felt that same plastic crinkle against my finger.

           I didn’t react to what I felt and dropped the $1.25 I owed into the box and hurried back to my seat where I tried to reconcile with what I knew -or thought- wasn’t possible. I sat there breathing through my hands clasped over my mouth and nose. There must have been 2 baggies in the pocket, that’s the only way. I had been so worried about the first one I found I didn’t think to search for anything else in the pocket. Once again I reached in and pulled out the same sinister bag with the same tight ball of white powder packed into it. I felt around, searching the corners of the pocket for anything else I may have missed but all I found were benign pills of lint.

This time ditching the bag felt easier. I slid down the window beside me just a crack, stood up and stuffed the bag out the window sending it tumbling down the road behind us.

“Hey what the hell do you think you’re doing!?” said the driver already easing onto the brakes. The shout shocked me out of my surroundings. I tried to mutter an apology but the sight of the bag had already rattled me out of my senses and I didn’t know what to say. The bus came to a sharp stop and before the driver could say it, I was already shuffling out the door into the cold evening air once again.

           As the bus drove away I thought the sky looked darker, the air felt heavier and the wind was biting colder. Looking around to my surprise I was only a block away from the train station, somewhere lit, warm and away from what I knew sat in the gutter only a few yards away. I strode on the rest of the way and entered the station. My mood immediately brightening under the yellow lights. The digital sign showed that a train was still about 5 minutes from pulling up. I sat down on a bench, exhausted not only from my earlier sprint but also from the realization of how close I had come to slipping up. To it all being a waste.

 All the time I had spent over the past two months. The therapy, the withdrawls, the praying and apologizing to my family through letters they would never read. All for nothing if I hadn’t thrown those baggies away. I threw my head back and took in a proud breath, letting it fill every space of my chest. My first real challenge was over, I had stared my demons in the face and tossed them aside like the toothy traps they were.

I was actually proud of myself, going through the treatment and the motions of what to do once we were out. Practicing saying ‘No’ out loud to our would be offerers of the very thing we swore to leave in our past once we were in the real world. But this wasn’t how I imagined I would face my addiction for the first time but I was glad it was over now.

I started to feel warm under the lights of the station and the acrid soot and dust filled air churned up by each passing train made each breath stuffy and unsatisfying. I unbuttoned my jacket and I felt my hand once again brush against something bulging out from my inside my breast pocket.

No it can’t be. I checked it on the bus, it was empty, it was fucking empty, I made sure of it last time, I checked and it was empty. I let out a nervous laugh to ease myself trying to shake the creeping feeling that I was beginning to go crazy. I reached into my pocket begging to find nothing, hoping I had imagined that familiar round bulge and that all I would find was a piece of paper saying ‘Gotcha’ and to find out this was all either some grand hallucination or cruel joke. There was just no way there could be something in that pocket, let alone the same bag I had tossed aside twice. I lifted up the green buttonless flap reached in and pulled out that same white ball tied into a corner of a plastic bag.

I threw the baggie like it was a writhing mouse onto the concrete floor in front of me and began raking my fingers through the roots of my hair. I let out a loud single manic tone that rolled down the stone walls of the empty station. I couldn’t believe it, there it was again. My old friend, my old nemesis, my whole world for so many lost years staring up with the same eyes it had always bored into me. I started to laugh at the ceiling mocking the God I had put my trust in just days ago. Why had he condemned me to this suffer this temptation over and over again. Had I not suffered enough?

I tore off the jacket and watched it slump to the floor and out from that same breast pocket came a tiny clink as a syringe, already filled and dripping with that same precious cloudy solution I knew so well, impossibly came rolling out onto the floor.

I shot up from the bench and stumbled back away from the cursed thing unbelievably staring at the loaded syringe calling me with its orange cap, beckoning me to grab onto it, to hold it close and keep it warm from the cold floor it laid on.

“One more sweety, one more to mend that broken heart. It’s not like sobriety will bring your mother back, you’re the same selfish shell you’ve always been. I’m all you have now, me and a tattered backpack filled with all the useless shit you own.” Its thoughts seem to echo in my head. I fell down and winced away from it, pushing my palms into my squinted eyes to black out the lights of the station and to avert its gaze.

           When I removed my hands and opened my eyes again, I looked down at my outstretched arms and saw the syringe standing up, already plunged into my skin and watched as its contents mixed with wisps of blood and emptied into my veins. The world swirled around me as I sloppily stood up and felt that warm opium blanket wrap my body and brain in that sweet buzzing euphoria. That carnal itching sensation letting me know everything was alright for just this little while. My dazed euphoria turned to a sick dread as what I had always known was made even more obvious. It was right, I would always be the same person who chose drugs over my mother’s dying words and wishes, and right now, for this feeling, I would do it all over again. I was already gone.

           I took a few nodding steps toward the rails and fell down onto my face. Painless blood started running from somewhere on my numbed face. I propped my arms beneath me and stood up to glance at where I had been sitting and saw my mother picking up my discarded jacket. She held it out in her hands and met my eyes with a smile. That warmth and love I had been chasing all this time was shown to me in the face of the one I had missed the most. The person I had betrayed and left to die. I turned to stare down the tunnel and was met with a single light widening on the tracks before me. I opened my arms to greet the cold barreling train car and met it with pure bliss and a bloody smile.