Darkness can creep up upon you, take over you before you even have a chance to scream. I don't mean actual darkness. I mean the depths of your own soul that even you are afraid to peer into. That side of you that you never want to admit is there, though it finds ways to remind you and lurks on the outskirts of the life you fool people into thinking you're happy living.
Happiness itself is a sham, but I digress.
People in general live false, shallow, and even pointless lives. They do what society tells them they're supposed to, and then they come home feeling satisfied for doing absolutely nothing within the grand scheme of things. I'm guilty of that myself; everyone is. I used to express my own views upon the world through painting, poetry, whatever artistic flavor I was feeling at the moment. Usually painting. Many thought me different, odd, dark, and of course, I was. I reflected a truth back to them they did not want to see. I didn't want to see it either, and to avoid it, I did whatever I could. That was my downfall.
Only now, it's my salvation.
Within the hands of death, I was given life.
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
3 days before Infernal Friday
When AJ McLean checked into the Adult Men's Residential and Recovery Program over in Orlando, he wasn't sure about the whole idea. He pretty much summed it up as a huge waste of his time and his mother's money. He didn't care if he had a problem or not. He wasn't hurting anyone except for himself, and to him, it was more of a release than harm.
It was the tears of his mother that had convinced him perhaps he did have a bigger problem. Taking his coke-infused anger out upon her had given him his severe wave of a reality check. Hitting his mother, the one who had always stood by him after his father had abandoned them when he was only a child. Hurting his mother, who never stopped believing in him, despite his inability to experience the joy she did in the little things of life. Harming her, when he clearly saw that she was too good for him, that he wasn’t worthy of being her son. It was that event which had snapped him into rehab. Not self-realization, not religion, nothing more than seeing her heart break.
So now he was in a sterile and empty room, with a bed that felt like cardboard and fellow inmates who made him feel almost normal. Which, for that to be said in any situation involving him, was bothersome. He wasn’t sure how to take his new separation from the outside world yet. It was the absence of cocaine that was beginning to drive him mad.
Already, he had spent a better part of the day with his head in the toilet, regurgitating every molecule he’d eaten and some he was sure he hadn’t eaten. He had heard withdrawal was tough, but this was ridiculous. He hadn’t had the urge to eat much anyway, even before the vomiting. Now that that had finally passed, he rested upon the stiff board of a bed and turned on the TV the room had. He had to watch something, do something. Otherwise, his mind would immediately travel back to thoughts of the pleasures of the drug that brought him here.
“I’m Riley Blake, for Channel Three News, here with Florida’s War Watch down at the…”
He smirked at the news that came on and shook his head. The war itself was a perfect example of all that was wrong with the world. It was a world of selfishness, one where few people cared and where everyone pretended they did. A world of illusions and no depth behind them. Even when he was younger, back in the days when he wanted to be a singer and performed his own original songs and everything, he had seen the world that way. And that was why he’d never gotten anywhere with music. Depressing songs about all-consuming darkness and the salvation of death never went well with the majority of the world’s population.
His gifts were all artistically centered and abreast a view that saw the world in a truthful way. For the longest time after his failure in music, he had done nothing but write poetry and had been mildly well-accepted. AJ had even had one solitary book published, which few people bought. He’d gotten bored soon after. Then he’d gone to his current love of painting. When he painted, he felt his energy escape into the brush and be shown through impressionistic strokes. The painting thing hadn’t taken off, but he didn’t hate the starving artist world yet.
It was hard to mind much when he was cracked out of his mind almost every night of the week.
Drugs alleviated the pain his perspectives gave him. He had tried to change growing up, but struggled with everything, with the effort behind living. If not for his mother and grandmother, he would have gone a long time ago. The therapists told him he had all the signs of clinical depression. Ironically, it meant he’d be taking another pill every week. When he’d told the doctor that his coke addiction should count as self-medication, AJ was pretty sure he had seen the neutral face of the therapist crack slightly with annoyance. AJ had laughed in his face before leaving the office and going back to his room.
Counter-productive though it was, seeing the workers at the clinic try to get a handle on his natural personality amused him to no end. He couldn’t help how his mind worked, and battling his addiction, wasn’t he being taught that drugs would never help him deal with the world? And now, because of a mental affliction he’d supposedly been born with that had gone undiagnosed, he’d be taking drugs anyway.
Life was not without its own twisted sense of humor, it seemed.
