The Process of a Miracle.

It was a little corner wing of a hospital where I stayed in my last and final detox. The walls painted in a creamy peach brown mix. Clean, sanitized and locked away from the rest of the hospital.

Safe from the world and safe from ourselves…for at least a few moments in time.

The windows were screwed shut and all we could do was to look down at the world. Watching as the people below rushed back and forth to the here’s and there’s of their lives, while we each went through our own individual hellish nightmares of the detox process.

After twelve years of constant abuse, this would be was my last and final trip into the train wreck of kicking heroin and one of the more painful ones. The methadone they provided to curb the withdrawal symptoms just could not match the appetite and tolerance my body had developed for it’s own fix of medicine.

Heroin.

I stayed in the hospital bed for the first few days, dragging myself to the bathroom as each dose of methadone wore off, convulsing and dry heaving draped over the toilet bowl. Shots of anti-nausea medicine in my ass helped to an extent, but for the most part I was just sick.

I felt as if I was dying…the old part of me anyway.

Half awake dreams filled with sweat, blended into the cold shivers of the night. With the passing of each new day I felt a little bit more alive, even a bit more human. Finally after the worst of the withdrawal symptoms had passed, I got out of my bed, dressed in a hospital gown and I made my way into the community room.

These were my first steps into a new life I had yet to understand I was living. I attended a few “group” therapy sessions, met some of the other patients in the detox and felt fully and completely for the first time in a very long time, the grim reality of what my life had become….again.

A fucking mess.

I was homeless.
I was looking at three years in jail.
My family wanted nothing to do with me.
Any friends I once had at this point had walked away.
There was no longer College to contend with.
The job was gone.
I had nothing left.
I was on my own.
It was me and only me.

I had not only burnt all my bridges, I had completely obliterated them until they were nothing more then the ashes of what my life had once been floating in the wind. I no longer had any places left and no longer could afford the price of trying to avoid myself any further. Scared, terrified and feeling more alone then I have ever felt in my entire life I entered that detox with one thing in my mind…to stop using heroin.

That was the same intention most of us came in with anyway. But as one day turned into two, then three….. people that had come in on a wave of desperation began to leave.

They couldn’t resist the call of the next one.

Jobs, relationships, families, bills…things that had not mattered one bit when using, suddenly became the focal point of why they had to leave immediately. I would smile, silently wishing them well, not bothering with futile attempts to convince them to stay. I knew those lies, that swam in their minds, I had told myself the very same ones with every previous detox I had checked into. I knew the power of the disease and I knew that it’s call to us was more powerful then my pleas of sanity of why they should stay.

One by one…they left until only three of us remained.

New people came, new people left. It was a revolving door that turned on the hinges of misery and sadness. It swung one way only to those who would sit and wait out the frustration and anger that raged within us all, offering to us the promise of a new chance at life….if we let the cravings pass.

The detox unit was composed of one small hallway with a few patient rooms, a nurses station, a community room and a kitchen. This is where the few of us all spent most of our time. The refrigerator was filled with a variety of snacks to help promote our “new” life. Fresh fruit, yogurt, fruit juices…..foods rich with the essentials none of us bothered with while running wild in the grips of our addictions. It took days before I could handle any food. My body was just so beat up, I no longer had the natural capacity to digest food properly without my body trying to dispel it.

So I ate graham crackers… A LOT of graham crackers.

Unwrapping them from there cellophane package, I would break the squares in two, making small neat piles and then place them on my little folded napkin. After my piles were complete I would start by taking small bites, chewing slowly, then swallowing. Hoping with each little bite and swallow, they didn’t try to force there way back up in a fit of dry heaves.

The kitchen was a place where I began to once again become alive.

With only time on our hands, we would sit for hours. The walls of the kitchen were decorated with pictures from past patients that had sat in the same chairs I now did. Poetry, song lyrics, colorful bits and pieces of the many lives that had spent there time here recovering as well. It was a place where we all breathed a bit easier and felt a little less of the pain that we had all allowed to consume us for so long.

Hope sparked within us…connected us….for a moment in time.

Sudden bursts of laughter would echo through the halls as we shared our stories of insanity, tears rolling silently as we whispering our pain. Dreams were passed freely to one another. And we naively believed, that this hope would be enough to keep us all clean once we left the safety of the locked ward.

The kitchen of the detox looked out over the parking lot of the hospital. At night all that remained was the ghostly outlines of the parking spaces that glowed from the lights that surrounded it.

I remember sitting by the window a few nights before I was to leave. Two little piles of graham crackers sat on my napkin on the ledge of the locked window. Looking down I watched as two people who had just signed themselves out AMA wandered down below heading out to get there fix.

They looked lost…unsure of which way to go, they would begin in one direction then turn around to go in the opposite direction. Stopping, talking, starting out again, then finally heading off in different directions…alone

Back onto the merry go round of addiction they again had lost their power to choose.

I sat curled in a chair, hospital blanket draped over and around me. Carefully choosing from my two pile of crackers I would select one, dipping it into my cup of milk. Holding it under, waiting for the moment just before it would disintegrate and plop it into my mouth savoring the way the slight sweetness and cool taste of the milk mixed in my mouth.

I would stare out the window through the ghostly reflection of myself, looking down and wonder what had become of those that had left. What would become of those who had stayed?

What would become of me?

It’s been over two years since that moment in time and I am the only person that has continued to stay clean. Sometimes I still wonder how I got out of that cesspool I swam in for so long.

Why me and not them?
Why some and not others?
How did I escape when so many others died and will continue to die?

And as I sit curled in a chair in this new place in time, I look out my bedroom window, down at the world below and think the very same thing I did then….

What now will become of me?