Just a story

Just a story

Small chapter one

So many of us can live in the past just to make our futures seem tolerable. So many of us focus on the future to erase our past. Many of us are in the present yet so far from it. I started remembering things I had Forced myself to forget. Beautiful things and terrible things. These things need to be told for me to move on.

I remember the first time I tried to hurt myself to cure my pain. I had watched a show that had a character that would use a box cutting blade to "cure" her emotional pain. I remember thinking it an amazing idea. Yet I had never given thought to how often it needed to be done. I remember having an urge to see just how deep I could go without welling with tears. I never cried. Was this odd? I had pain, yet no tears...

A year or so had passed and I found myself reliant on long sleeves. Something had to change. I had to get rid of this... Method that turned out to be a curse. It had to be traded in for something better... Or something else. I used to feel as if I were dying every day but was vacant of any physical illness.

I couldn't find an outlet that was as helpful. So this behavior continued for another year or so. I never kept track of these types of things.

I had a crush on a girl that I already knew would never have me. Perhaps the reason for this is because she knew my secret. I will never know.But she did give me one good idea before disappearing from my life forever...









Small chapter two

Her name was Crystal. Her middle name should have been Irony. She had opened up a new path for me to choose to follow or ignore. It was a path made of shattered fiber glass called meth... Crystal meth. I wonder if I would be telling you this story had I chosen to ignore it...

We were at a park in the nameless town in the nameless state I lived in with a bunch of people that I thought would be in my life forever. Crystal was there. She had a small baggy full of what looked like shards of glass. She asked me if I wanted to try some shit. I didn't know it was a slang term for it at the time, but I knew it was a drug so I agreed. A few months passed and the only knife or blade I picked up was a butter knife. I thought things were going good for my psyche. I thought I had beaten the curse.

They say the main cause of divorce is marriage. I knew it was because of children. I also knew my parents were doomed to it the moment I found out what the meaning of divorce was. I had been correct. My parents split up and forced my sister and I to vacate our only comfort in life, our home. Slowly but without a doubt, my "friends" started to vanish from my life and with them any connections to meth that I had. After we ditched our life my father, sister and I moved into a Motel until we could save money. It was about a year of hell. Hell.

(/\ Add how your father had almost cut his thumb off and tried to commit suicide by running himself off the road somehow...)

This hell was filled with regret, anger, depression, suicidal thoughts and anguish I thought I had already known. I couldn't have been more wrong. we had to leave or we would all surely kill ourselves. My father moved in with his sister. My sister moved in with... I can't remember, but she had a place to go. I moved in with my best friend. His mother and his grandmother were kind and truly a light in these dark times. I don't know what would have happened if they hadn't been there to scrape my soul out of the dirt.

With most of my friends and family, meth had gone as well. Marijuana just wasn't the same as something painful or something harder. Neither was drinking. I did these things anyway. Along with them I relapsed into cutting even deeper. The fear of serious injury was null and void. It simply did not exist in my mind. It helped me cope. I now know that coping should never be an option. I thought myself lucky to have been invited to some parties and established some new dealers in the area. Hurting myself was only kept at the boarders of my thoughts. But still absent from my flesh for a while. I felt like I had won again.









Small chapter 3

I didn't hear from my parents too often. My mother had asked my sister and I what we thought she should do at the time of their marriage's demise. She had left the state after My sister and I had given her the advice to do so in order to be with her side of the family... Her support group.

My life had filled with a chain of self medication that no doctor would condone. There were too many hangovers to count, so many seventy-two hour waking periods that I usually didn't know what day of the week it was. Much less did I care. There were even times that I was so sober I had to sleep the depression away. Usually nightmares haunted me then.

My father came by very rarely, but when he did he brought food and things to help out my best friend's mother with taking me under her wing. Other than that his life was a bit cryptic. For that I do not blame him for my life was starting to become a bit obscure to me as well.

one day he came buy and told me that he had an apartment that was ready for us to move into. Our family had helped him obtain it. This surprised me. I remember thinking that it would never be like home, but that it was a good start.

A few weeks after living there we realized that our neighbor was a meth dealer. He lived with his mother and couldn't smoke in his home. By this time my father and I had started doing the drug together and had struck a deal with our neighbor. He could use our apartment to use his drugs if we got to use them with him free of charge. I remember thinking about how lucky we were.

My dad worked hard to keep a roof over our head but it wasn't enough to keep food in the cupboards and refrigerator. Food was a constant worry and was always scarce. There was one point in which my father had tearfully admitted to my aunt that he had eaten a can of cat food on moldy bread. Soon after that My aunt and uncle completely filled our kitchen to the brim with food. I doubted that it was a miracle. But that was before I knew that God works wonders through people. Surely the worst was over.









Small chapter 4

The worst had only begun. For a full year it was nothing but addiction and depression. Every day I traded sadness for drugs. Within this year I had been drinking alcohol,smoking weed, crack and meth, doing ecstasy and any pills I could get my hands on. At the moment the pills included Sanata, soma, vicoden and Xanax. I even tried 80X salvia divinorum a few times.

I was so numb for so long that I believe I forgot how to deal with the simplest of emotions. You cannot go too long on so much all of the time. There were points I tried to quit it all. But they only became small waning periods. The come downs and "recoveries" were the hardest of all. Voices plagued me and paranoia fallowed me. I was so unhealthy that I would pass out at least once a week from lack of proper nourishment. It was Ironic that we now had food and I still neglected to consume it. Meth tricks your mind into thinking you are not hungry.

My father felt a world of guilt for, in his own words, "failing his marriage and children". I never held it against him though. I wasn't a very spiritual person nor a religious one at the time. But it was easy to forgive him when I knew how powerless he must have felt this whole time. If I had known how great his burden was I probably would have shown a lot more support. Now the regret of that is my burden.

He began working with his brother in-law framing houses when we lived in motel hell. He stayed working with him for the time we were in the apartment as well. Then he had his accident.

He had been working on the trusses of a house (this is what would soon be an attic) and made a miscalculation of where his footing was and fell almost twelve feet to a concrete slab. On the way down a nail found it's way to his calf and tore him open worst than I had been doing to my own arms. He couldn't work. He asked me to carry the torch and continue working in his place.

Why I hadn't done this sooner still confuses me to this day. Was I really that resentful toward him that I didn't help...? My answer is yes. I must have been. I blamed my parents for a lot of things that I could have changed if I had only pulled myself together and realize the strength I still had left in my soul. In my heart. My dad had always been my hero. I had always wanted to fallow in his foot steps and now there seemed to be a chance. So I told my father that it was his turn to rest and my turn to take care of his broken pride and injured manhood. To be continued...









Small Chapter 5

It was my first day on the job and I hadn't slept the night before. I lined up some meth and waited for my uncle to pick me up so I could start my new job. They always say the first day is always the hardest. But with a nose full of drugs and an ego to come with it, nothing was impossible.

My uncle was a hard man to work for. He didn't earn his reputation as on of the best framers in his town by being nice. Every mistake I made I would have to undo and then redo. I used to think that my dad was clumsy because he would always come home with nicks and bruises. Then I figured out that building the skeleton of a house wasn't as easy as I thought it would be. I still found that it was very gratifying at the end of the day and that was well worth it.

My fellow workers always told me to wear sunglasses even on the overcast days. I never knew why until one day I was using the nail gun. A nail ricochet off of a knot in the wood and literally shattered my glasses. I don't think I would have a functional right eye if I hadn't listened to them.

I started to really like the job after a few weeks but when I got home I had to deal with a cold shower and drugs I was starting to abhor. I was addicted and there was no escape now. I repeated this cycle for some time and finally couldn't handle the depression of all of it. It suddenly hit me... I am back at square one. But this time I actually had problems. I had to get away. I talked with my father about this and he looked at me with regretful and teared up eyes. I could tell he didn't want to say what he was about to...

He handed me an envelope and waited for me to look inside of it. It was a plane ticket to NY with my name on it. "This is about what you want, Brandon. This is a refundable ticket that your uncle bought for you. If you want to stay and keep doing this you can. But I want you to go and make a better life for yourself. Choose well because this is the only time this will happen." We both cried. We hugged for what seemed like forever until we both realized we were about to suffocate each other.He had explained to me that if I made the choice to go that he would move into his brother in-law's and my sister would move in with her boyfriend. I had a choice to leave the drugs cold turkey. Begin fresh and try to deal with my depression in a positive manner. I knew it wasn't going to be easy. But the problems I had created for my self weren't easy as they were. So I left.

There isn't a day that I don't think about these true struggles that I have been through. And I also think about How different It would be if I had stayed. But I will always know that no matter what you choose in life, there will always be regrets and hard times that have passed and ones that await us all in the future. The only thing you can possibly do wrong is stand still and watch others make their choices. Thanks for reading this. My heart goes out to all of you for carrying me through this process of letting go. God Bless and stay positive...