Quarantine just might kill me yet...

My quarantine life is one now relegated to the inside of four walls, and shockingly, perhaps pathetically, hasn't changed drastically from my stay at home mom life. Although, this means my friends are dying at a more rapid pace. Isolation is the second greatest threat and enemy to rehabilitation and sobriety, with the harmful stigma surrounding drug addiction being the first. I foresee a ‘junkie' genocide in my, our, drab future. We aren't particularly fond of that word, however, so I suppose I could say an addict abolition.

I spent the previous two years pregnant for one, and adjusting to new mom life with my newborn for the other. While rewarding, it certainly doesn't do wonders for your, my, mental health, that's for sure. I couldn't wait until Spring rolled around, which only made my jabbering about it for the months prior to my husband, even more pathetic once Spring did roll around with a global pandemic attached to it.

I spend my days alternating between smoke breaks, watching my child play, and fantasizing about the feel of the prick of the poison filled needle that brings with it the gift of nothingness. I'm talking about heroin for those unfamiliar with drugs or the sensuality of subtle wordplay that may have missed my intent.

You see, some folks, most folks get it all wrong. We addicts, we aren't chasing happiness or pleasure, or any of those other feelings we likely have never even known or experienced before. We are seeking the numbness, the gift of nothingness, that the pin pricked kiss of the needle brings. We live inside a purgatory inside our minds where this incurable, invasive disease we suffer from invades our every thought. For us, the darkness pushes through to cloak even our light and lightest times, inside a veil of secrecy and blackness where addiction grows and thrives. The mental relapse is the first sign that you're headed back into Satan’s deceptively starry sky. Once he, or she, as Satan may in fact be a woman as cunning as the beast is, has you in it's grasp, nothing is safe. The sounds of my baby's footsteps, unsteady like a newborn fawn as he learns to walk, are now replaced with the demonic chatter of my afflictions luring me back into their deadly world.

Unlike my son, who has all the unconditional love of his doting mother, my childhood was vastly different. The Elmo my son hugs and shakes, for me, replaced with a narcotic filled pill bottle rattle. Or more likely than not, a penny filled medication bottle as my mother and father had already ingested the potent drugs inside. Some of those narcotics given to me also, under the guise of them being vitamins. I was nine years old when I became dependent on and addicted to a variety of narcotics. I then spent the next fifteen years living inside a hell few can imagine, encapsulated with drugs, attempted suicide, child abuse, and sexual assault, just to name a few.

I was twenty-four-year-old when I died, the first time, only to be revived shortly thereafter. If you've never endured the hell of drug addiction, I certainly don't recommend it, nor could you possibly understand it. Even after achieving nine years of long term sobriety, the thoughts still pervasive as ever protruding into my otherwise blissful world. That needle would be the kiss of death, no doubt. But the addiction forces me to only fantasize about the kiss part of that prick that for me brings with it the momentary lapse of the memories of trauma. To forget the trauma is a bliss you just can't know unless you have suffered from the irreversible kind. The kind in which there is no fix for, as you are irreparably damaged, as I certainly am.

People think we don't know we're killing ourselves with drugs. We know, we just hope and pray we can kill the painful memories before we kill ourselves entirely. Or like my heroin addict friend Diana, molested for years by her priest as a child, only hope as she will never pray again.
Hope is something we in the addiction community are in terribly short, if not non existent supply of, however.
You would think we were made for this life of isolation, we addicts, seeing as a majority of our lives we typically spend quarantined trying to run from and fight an invisible disease that's killing us in large numbers. But, we're not, and in fact our community's fatality rates only rapidly increase as this pandemic rages.

So, just for today I hope and also pray that I won't pick up the poison that will grant me the gift of nothing that I abnormally and overwhelmingly crave far more than the gift of something. Covid 19 and it's deadly symptoms can't compete with the horror of addiction and it's symptoms, but together, together they just might kill me yet.