(no subject)
The first time ever, I was housesitting. I'd flirted with alcohol, illicitly procured, but in a nonchalant, sophisticated manner.
This thing shall not control me.
I was young, bitter, disillusioned, lost. I had fought with J - we weren't speaking any longer. His friendship had been stability at that very pivotal point in my life. I was questioning and discarding things that had been bred into me. Knowing him had shown me there was a different way to exist, to feel, to think. At 18, I embraced it as an alternative to the stifling strictures that had shaped my life to that point. It was fresh air, a cool breeze after a stifling July, the smell of rain on a summer evening.
Losing that friendship that very first time threw me off badly. Having so recently discarded everything else, I started careening madly about existence. I stayed up for days on end, with Bauhaus on repeat, reading Hamlet over and over again, razor blades pressed against my wrist. I dated, ironically, another J - younger, more vicious, smelling of nightmares and blood. Maybe I had thought he had the potential to be a carbon copy, maybe I was looking for someone to help me shore up these disintegrating ideas- who knows. Perhaps I was attempting to replace the first friend I'd ever had, and found a companionship of sorts could be traded for tight vinyl shirts, knives, blood, and incense in the moonlight. I'll call him J2. I think he's dead now, crushed in an industrial accident a few years ago.
My life is a litany of interactions with one J or another. It's almost nauseating.
A friend of my grandmother went away, and I was to housesit for her. Gather the mail, let the dog out, etc. J2 went with me; we peeled layers of clothing off in the master bedroom and watched dark movies late into the night. The smell of his hair is forever seared into my memory; he had tall spikes and I can't forget the smell of whatever he used to create the spikes.
There was an email from my mother; searingly vitriolic, attacking my persona. Or maybe it wasn't and my own perception was skewed. All I know is after I read it, it was as if the whole world had walked away from me. I went to the kitchen and started ripping cupboards open, looking for alcohol.
What possessed me to do that, I still don't know. I'd never been around anyone drinking. I'd never seen liquor used to escape unhappiness. But some instinctive knowledge certainly did drive me for a bottle. J2 was on the internet, maybe. In what would become a pattern, I quietly destructed. I stood with a bottle of vodka in one hand and maybe soda in the other - I remember it was red.
I remember it was red because I rapidly drank myself into obliteration. J2 noticed as I was violently vomiting some time later and tried to calm me down. I brushed him off, rinsed my mouth, and went back to slamming vodka. I remember sitting on a couch in a darkened room, drinking with tears running down my face while dimly watching 'Strangeland'. I'm sure I must've cut myself also; I don't know how I could've avoided it. J2 was a cutter too, a rare male specimen.
Substances became the only way I knew to express, to emote, to feel for a very long time.
This thing shall not control me.
I was young, bitter, disillusioned, lost. I had fought with J - we weren't speaking any longer. His friendship had been stability at that very pivotal point in my life. I was questioning and discarding things that had been bred into me. Knowing him had shown me there was a different way to exist, to feel, to think. At 18, I embraced it as an alternative to the stifling strictures that had shaped my life to that point. It was fresh air, a cool breeze after a stifling July, the smell of rain on a summer evening.
Losing that friendship that very first time threw me off badly. Having so recently discarded everything else, I started careening madly about existence. I stayed up for days on end, with Bauhaus on repeat, reading Hamlet over and over again, razor blades pressed against my wrist. I dated, ironically, another J - younger, more vicious, smelling of nightmares and blood. Maybe I had thought he had the potential to be a carbon copy, maybe I was looking for someone to help me shore up these disintegrating ideas- who knows. Perhaps I was attempting to replace the first friend I'd ever had, and found a companionship of sorts could be traded for tight vinyl shirts, knives, blood, and incense in the moonlight. I'll call him J2. I think he's dead now, crushed in an industrial accident a few years ago.
My life is a litany of interactions with one J or another. It's almost nauseating.
A friend of my grandmother went away, and I was to housesit for her. Gather the mail, let the dog out, etc. J2 went with me; we peeled layers of clothing off in the master bedroom and watched dark movies late into the night. The smell of his hair is forever seared into my memory; he had tall spikes and I can't forget the smell of whatever he used to create the spikes.
There was an email from my mother; searingly vitriolic, attacking my persona. Or maybe it wasn't and my own perception was skewed. All I know is after I read it, it was as if the whole world had walked away from me. I went to the kitchen and started ripping cupboards open, looking for alcohol.
What possessed me to do that, I still don't know. I'd never been around anyone drinking. I'd never seen liquor used to escape unhappiness. But some instinctive knowledge certainly did drive me for a bottle. J2 was on the internet, maybe. In what would become a pattern, I quietly destructed. I stood with a bottle of vodka in one hand and maybe soda in the other - I remember it was red.
I remember it was red because I rapidly drank myself into obliteration. J2 noticed as I was violently vomiting some time later and tried to calm me down. I brushed him off, rinsed my mouth, and went back to slamming vodka. I remember sitting on a couch in a darkened room, drinking with tears running down my face while dimly watching 'Strangeland'. I'm sure I must've cut myself also; I don't know how I could've avoided it. J2 was a cutter too, a rare male specimen.
Substances became the only way I knew to express, to emote, to feel for a very long time.