kitten and boo boo

It was literally rock bottom, standing outside of a horrible halfway house in a horrible neighborhood in New Haven, almost in tears calling my boyfriend to come rescue me. Luckily he did. I was 38, and I figured I had about a month to live and that was being generous. Alcohol, pills, hard drugs, I looked like I was approaching the other side very soon. My days were mostly spent getting as fucked up as possible until I blacked out and ended up passing out on my dirty naked mattress on the floor in my shitty little rented room. I was honestly ready to finally just die. My life has become hideously small and repetitive, and nothing gave me any sort of joy. 

Look, I’ll be straight up- I had recently attempted suicide again for the hundredth time and had started burning again which meant things were getting very acute. When you’re putting cigarettes out on your arm and holding a lighter directly against your skin because the pain of living is so all consuming that you have to quite literally burn it out of yourself something is wrong. 

My last days in New Haven were a complete blur. I was picked up from the half way house by Kyle in tears carrying just my purse and a backpack. We spent a morning frantically rescuing my shit from my storage unit. I was sweating and sick and I still had crack in my system and needed some fucking alcohol. I didn’t understand exactly that my life was drastically changing and I couldn’t comprehend anything beyond the basic need to survive. Leaving that fucking rooming house for the last time I slammed the door on my way out and said goodbye to no one, I knew I would never see those assholes again and it was like a gift from God.

We loaded the car with literally everything I owned in the entire world, three storage totes and 15 trash bags of clothes and shoes. A TV, a mirror, my painting. I left almost everything behind because I wasn’t even sure if I’d be alive in a few days or not, and right then in that moment I didn’t fucking care. Driving to my new home I put my arm out the car window and prayed for a drink, prayed when I unpacked I’d find something stashed away in one of my little hiding spots. I was cold in the summer heat, sweating and pale. I kept my gas station sunglasses on because the light hurt and so did my heart. I didn’t want to live.

New Haven took my fucking soul and everything I had. It spit me out and left me broken and crying in a car speeding away leaving because it was going to fucking kill me. New Haven took stripped away the person I had been when I moved there over a decade ago and left me sputtering broken hungry ugly devastated and needing saving. New Haven never had a fucking thing to offer me and still I clung to the city like it was gold. I thought the 3am pizza and 3am dealers and 3am beer you could buy when the liquor stores and bars shut down at the pizza spot was all I fucking needed. I needed more.

When I left I literally thought I was going to die if I didn’t, and physically I probably would have. In my last days in the city I sunk so fucking low that I did something I always claimed I’d never do. Something I always called disgusting. I fucking smoked crack with some random lesbians behind a crumbling staircase in Fair Haven. The first time I held the stem to my lips I said to myself this is it, you can finally sign your own death certificate. You’ve reached your complete bottom and now it can be over and it won’t fucking hurt anymore.

The night I did crack I felt like my life would end very very soon and I had accepted that. I was fucking tired and haggard and ready to lay down and let my body just stop. My body was screaming so loud to just die, the constant physical pain, the constant emotional confusion and self hatred. When I took my last hit of crack that night I did it lying against my pillows on my bare mattress on the dirty floor of my shitty rented room with some homeless dude who looked like a crack head Hulk Hogan. I blew the smoke out, my thumb and forefinger burned and blistered a little from the pipe, my lips raw.

Things got to the point where it was either OD for the last time or decide to fucking live. OD’ing would have been so much fucking easier, just go to the green and buy some fenty and find a needle. I hadn’t shot up since 2014 but you don’t forget how once you learn. My plan was to buy as much as I could afford, tap one of the few good veins I had left and just let my body rot on that mattress, letting it be discovered only after the smell of decay infected the hallway and no one had heard from me for a few days. I could actually see my rotting body in my mind, the bloated stomach distended out. The purple and green bruising. The needle either still in my arm or close by me. The tattoos I loved so much that would rot in the ground.

Leaving was the only fucking way to stay alive, and I never want to go back to that horrible city. What it took from me was more than just my shit and my dignity, it pretty much took my fucking soul in the end. Sold it to New Haven for a night of crack and a bottle of gin and the promise of death. The last high, the days there were beyond dreamlike. I don’t want to remember. I am lucky I got the fuck out alive. Just barley, but I got out alive.