SECOND DAY IN DETOX

I’m in my medical gown in a hospital. I had all this anxiety, but then I saw the bars on the windows. This place is super locked down: people on every floor, name tags to get buzzed down, the door locks automatically behind you…It’s weird how knowing I can’t get out is the only thing calming me down.

This is my detox. This is where they drain the drugs out of my bloodstream. Life comes at you so fast. I can’t believe I’m 17 already, I feel like an old man. Everything hurts, everything hurts. Things I didn’t know could hurt, like my eye lids, fingernails, etc. I feel like I ordered my skin off eBay and it came 3 weeks late in the wrong size. When you’re dependent on opiates, you flood your body with so much synthetic endorphins that your body stops producing endorphins entirely. Endorphins are your body’s natural pain killer… this is why addicts go into withdrawal — their body stops producing endorphins, serotonin, dopamine… and there’s another one I know I’m forgetting.

No one explains this to you, and even if they did, addicts don’t listen, we’re all invincible… haha.

I’m at Fort Lauderdale Hospital, 4th floor: adolescents. Most of the kids here are the products of broken homes, abusive parents, and yet I sit here cause I simply cannot stop. There’s these three Seminole kids here, two boys and one girl. One is really cool, he’s in my room. He’s super metal. It started out as a fun pill, Oxys and Roxys. It was harder than I thought to admit my addiction… Fuck. I’m sorry, my existence is sorry. I think about all the things I’ve stole and sold for these tiny blue things.

That’s what they’re called. “Things.”

People say, “You got them thangs?”

“What things?”

“Dem green thangs.”

Oxy 80s are green so obviously called greens, Roxys are blue so they’re called blues… but nowadays, if you ask anyone if they got anything, people know what you mean. EVERYONE is on pills. The jocks, the nerds, the rednecks, the cheerleaders, the fat girls, the pretty ones, the rich kids, the trailer park kids… it’s everywhere. I read some article the other day that Broward County has more pain clinics than McDonald’s.

I WANT TO GET BETTER, but I haven’t been able to sleep. The muscle soreness, the pain... the leg pain is probably the worst, right behind my thighs. I used to think physical addiction was a myth. I was so stupid.

This is fucking unbearable.