My Story Part I

I awoke the morning of September 22, 2004 sick and sober. Well, mostly sober. The bottle of NyQuil I'd chased with 3 or 4 shots of whiskey the evening before had provided me a full night's sleep, but the remnants of the drugs now enveloped my brain in a thick fog that I knew would last the better portion of the day.

I stared at the ceiling.

The ceiling fan was still, and I could see a half-inch layer of dust clinging to the left side of every blade. Intense rays of sunlight forced themselves between the cracks in the venetian blinds that covered the sliding glass doors to the adjoining patio, creating illuminated stripes on the white comforter that I laid under. There was normalcy in those stripes. There were families, groceries, 9 to 5's, checking accounts, car payments, electric bills and mortgages. There were churches, friends, coworkers, meaningful relationships, doctor's appointments and minivans. There was security. There was so much freedom in being tied down by the trappings of a normal life. My eyes began to well with tears, but I quickly rubbed them away.

Attempting to ignore the searing pain that ran like an electric current through my skeletal system, I got out of bed and stumbled to the bathroom, bent like an elderly woman with a curved back. I was sweating lightly; the kind of sweating you do when you feel you might faint. A cold, clingy sweat, accompanied by chills and the inability to regulate one's body temperature. I sat on the toilet for about ten minutes that morning. Not just because I had diarrhea, but because in that tiny, windowless bathroom for those ten minutes, I could escape reality just enough to convince myself once again that I could get myself out of this mess. In that ten minutes, I could pull myself together and muster the last remnants of rational thought process in my brain to prevent another nervous breakdown. In that ten minutes, I could be a little girl again, playing hide and seek from the devastating waste my adult life had become.

Ten minutes passed, and then I pulled open the creaking bathroom door and allowed myself to be sucked back into the vacuum of that empty apartment and that empty life. A quick survey of my surroundings shattered the false hopes I'd conjured up while in the bathroom. A brown, faded cloth sectional sofa I'd purchased for $50 several months ago from a co-worker and a hand-me-down table and chairs were the only stitches of furniture in the place. In the northeast corner of the room, an older model television sat atop a cardboard moving box with the antenna twisted toward the window for better reception. Cable television was the stuff of fairytales. Next to the television, a transom window had been covered with aluminum foil. Nothing adorned the walls but several layers of "apartment white" paint, which peeled around holes where pictures once hung.

A faint rustling noise averted my attention to the adjoining kitchen. It was the flapping of a black garbage bag duct-taped to the exterior surface of the kitchen window. The hole it covered was almost as wide as my hips. Almost. I had the cuts to prove it. Nothing else stood out in the kitchen except for the fact it was empty; nothing on the countertops nor in the cupboard but several bottles of cheap liquor and some miscellaneous pantry staples which even Martha Stewart couldn’t assemble into a meal.

Sitting atop the counter which separated the kitchen from the open living area were three miscellaneous items that accounted for the condition of the apartment that morning and the state my life was in. Sitting on that counter, an empty glass, a dull razor blade, and a ¾ section of a plastic straw, screamed secrets about me I’d fought so fiercely to keep private for the past three years. I stared at that counter, trying to remember when my concept of reality had blurred with the drug-induced fantasies I had been living in. I couldn’t remember feeling sober; feeling “normal.”

My eyes began to well with tears once again as I allowed my mind to drift back three years earlier, when I had first moved to Las Vegas, Nevada. I’d moved to Las Vegas on a whim. I’d been sharing an apartment with a friend on St. Simons Island, Georgia and working at a law firm as a receptionist. I had a good group of friends, and overall, was happy with life. In the summer of 2001, I took a trip to Las Vegas to visit my best friend, who’d moved there after we graduated high school. I’d been out to visit her before, so the “glitz” of Sin City shouldn’t have seemed so glitzy. For some reason, though, that trip I found myself infatuated with the lights and heat, the chaos and debauchery. It was everything I’d never had and never really wanted…until that trip.

Shortly thereafter I sold the majority of my personal belongings, quit my job, packed a suitcase, and moved to the desert. I can still see the image of my father standing by the ticketing counters, watching me walk to the gate. He didn’t say much when he drove me to the airport that morning. He didn’t say much when I checked my suitcase. Until I have a child of my own, I will never know how it feels to watch your child make a life-altering decision that is so obviously wrong, and be powerless to stop them.

My mom didn’t make it to the airport with me that morning. In the months prior that I had been consumed with dreams of how different and exciting my life would be in Las Vegas, she had been in central Virginia selflessly nursing her mother, who was dying of colon cancer. While I dreamt of casinos, nightclubs, VIP tables and freedom, she dreamt of her childhood, and days when her mother would hold her in her lap. She dreamt of her wedding, and seeing her mother’s face as her father gave her away. She dreamt of telling her mother she was pregnant, and introducing her to a new baby. She dreamt of telephone calls, cards and letters, Thanksgivings, Christmases and Easters. Nothing in her life would ever be the same. My mother had been in Virginia with my grandmother for several months, and I hadn’t seen her in several weeks. I am not sure if I just ignored my mother’s current situation, or if at age 21 I just didn’t understand it fully, but nonetheless, I left Georgia without hesitation and without saying goodbye to my mother. Nothing in my life would ever be the same.