Today is exactly two years since I stuck a needle in my arm…or used any other mind or mood altering substance.
Two years to the date in which my entire world was flipped, swiveled and swerved to steer me in a new direction, leading to the journey upon the path where I would finally begin learning how to live my life.
Scattered above were big, white puffs of cotton-candy-clouds parading across the bright, blue of the mid-morning sky. Streams of sunlight danced down from above, breaking into shafts of light that broke through the clouds setting their edges aglow. I remember this day so clearly not because of it’s extraordinary beauty but because….
It was the last day I used…September 3, 2005.
When I awoke that morning I had no foresight, knowledge or understanding that by the close of the day I would be fighting for my life.
Fighting a battle for my right to live
Fighting myself for the choice to live.
At this stage of my addiction I had given up any hope that I would ever be clean. I had tried to stop using for so long that I no longer knew what I was fighting for. I had lost any recollection of freedom of choice I once may of had and submitted myself to the reality that I would die a heroin addict.
I would be a statistic.
I would be a body to walk over.
I would be the guilt my Mother cried over as she wondered what she did wrong?
I would be the lesson to my little nieces and nephews….to never use drugs.
I fed myself these false truths, swallowing the disgusting bitter aftertaste they oozed. My life left no room to believe in anything but the reality I floated through. As the days. blurred into years, every failed attempt to stop chipped away at any hope I had at finding freedom from the grips of my heroin addiction. In the end, all that remained was a pile of fragmented hopes, dreams and wishes of what I thought my life should have been and would never be.
Hopeless.
Empty.
Wasted.
A black hole of existence that contained nothing but the pulsating desire to use.
I received a phone call from a detective that morning asking me if I would be kind enough to come down to the police station to answer a few questions he had for me in regards to some stolen and forged checks.
I had never had any legal consequences for any of the scams and schemes I had utilized throughout the years I used; because I had never been caught…I though I never would be.
I was caught.
I sat in a little square of a room. The faded green walls, reeked of the obvious truth that I was not going to walk away from this situation. On his desk in little clear bags sat all the evidence of what I had done. I challenged the accusations he threw at me thinking I would be able to talk my way out of the situation. All I did was lie to myself..no one else was convinced.
He didn’t have enough to hold me…he threatened…he told me how much worse it would be if I didn’t come clean.
I wouldn’t budge.
I left the police station that day, my mind still spinning from what had occurred. It seemed almost unreal and so I dismissed it…I needed to use again. From the police station I drove straight into Brooklyn to pick up, thinking of how I could get around the situation and to rid myself of this inconvenience.
Later that night when I returned home, I had almost forgotten the earlier events of the day. I sat on the edge of my bathtub with my spoon, cotton ball, bag of dope and needle and shot up like I always did. I stood up to go out into my living room and out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of myself.
A real glimpse of myself.
A glimpse of the sadness.
A glimpse of the hopelessness.
A glimpse at the horror.
A glimpse at the destruction.
A glimpse at the dereliction.
A glimpse at the wasted life I lived.
A glimpse at the truth of who I had become.
Fully comprehending at every possible level the reflection of who I didn’t want to be, who I never planned to be was the image that stared at me…it was me.
Life at times can send you such shock-waves of truth that shake you to the core of your being; this was one of those times. All the lies, rationalizations, justifications and blame …all of it came pouring forth to reveal the absolute failure my life had become.
I was done.
For 12 years I had fought to stop using and failed miserably each time. Now I gave up, I decided it was time to surrender to the truth that the disease of addiction had completely defeated me and I had lost my desire to live.
Crying, I wrote letters to my family members telling them how sorry I was, how I just couldn’t find the strength to fight anymore…begging them to forgive me for giving up.
I remember sitting on my couch and pouring in four times the amount of heroin that I normally did in the spoon, I didn’t want to take a chance that I would live. Tears running down my face I stuck the needle into my arm and held my breathe as I pushed the plunger in..within seconds the darkness of the nod began to descend.
In between the darkness of death and the last shards of my life something in me began to fight…I began to fight.
A voice within me screamed into every cell of my body that death was not what I was looking for…the truth was that I didn’t want to die.
I just had no idea how to live.
Even in the dark depths of desperation..hope exists for change.
Until Tomorrow,
Mighty Morgan
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