Lullabies for Suffering: Tales of Addiction Horror

by Mark Matthews

Addiction starts like a sweet lullaby sung by a trusted loved one. It washes away the pains of the day and wraps you in the warmness of the womb where nothing hurts and every dream is possible. Yet soon enough, this warm state of bliss becomes a cold shiver. The ecstasy and dreams become nightmares, and for the sick and suffering addict, we can’t stop listening to the lullaby. We crave to hear the siren song as it rips us apart.

Horror has the capacity to speak to trauma in a unique fashion.

I met Calvin on the Singing Bridge outside Rosewood Park on the night of December 24th. I’d gone there to kill myself, and though he never admitted it, so had he. It was there in his eyes, the same flat look of grim resignation I’m sure I carried in mine. Everyone goes there to die. It’s become a cliché, but such things don’t matter when the end of your life is concerned.

But that’s the interesting thing about suicide. It’s a personal thing, perhaps the most personal thing of all, the very last measure of control. Thus, having someone else do it doesn’t count. Instinct will revolt if the executioner isn’t you.

You’re only fine until you tell on yourself.

I’m tired. Worn down to ash by the pretense of being human, of being sane, of being, period.”

“The same happens to everyone. Even if you’re known in life, we’re all strangers in death.”

There’s always a moment in which you decide you’ve had enough of being nothing, that it’s time to put the eraser down before you vanish completely, that you’re finally ready to make a fresh start. The problem with that resolution is that it’s like deciding to build a house because you know where to find a hammer.

Here’s the funny thing about rehab: it’s full of people who smile and tell their stories and congratulate each other and applaud and give out coins and then walk back out into the world with no idea what to do with themselves.

You live in a state of perpetual dissatisfaction, of being a passenger on the wrong train looking longingly out the window at all the happy people traveling the right one.

You become an expert at spotting people who are carrying, and they’re the angels beckoning a return to the fold. It’s grief, it’s mourning, and there’s only one way to cure it. It’s why they call it a fix.

“You’re a horrible, ugly, soulless leech,” my mother shrieked at me, and shoved my face into the wall. The pattern filled my vision, became a world lit by disintegrating stars. I felt an explosion of pain and heard an awful dull crunch inside my skull as my nose broke. All because I burned the eggs.

In my experience, nothing halts the onset of the dreaded morning after better than a chemical extension. It’s why alcoholics always keep a few beers in the fridge and vampires sleep in coffins. It’s a protective measure against unwanted intrusion.

You do what you have to do to survive and you don’t survive unless you take action.

“I’ve done too much damage. I can’t repair it. The world doesn’t want me, I don’t want it, and that’s just how it is. Trying to shove myself into places I’m not supposed to fit just crushes me under the weight.”

The whispers were the soundtrack of my life, background noise from the scared, angry child inside me I’d learned to live with.

She was living inside an answered prayer, and needed to remember the hurt that her sickness caused.

The prick of the needle punctured her, found a vein, blood was drawn. The chorus sang their loudest halleluiahs as she pushed in the plunger and an opiate orgasm ran up her spine.

The knife, it’s a zipper, right? It lets me open up and share the things that are inside me. Things that I’m too embarrassed or repressed to share. Yeah, that’s what I believed at first. It lets me feel things that I am too numbed to feel.

When does it become too much? Have you ever thought of that? I doubt it. Few addicts, myself included, do. Why would you? But think about it with me for a minute. When does the need for something, the raw, aching desire for something, become an addiction? What’s the razor line between the two? When do you finally reach the point where you need a substance to fill that huge, gaping hole in your life? And nothing else can?

When does it slip over, eh? When does an addiction cross into something that flirts with death? All addictions ultimately do. You understand that, right? I don’t care if you’re addicted to sour cream or crystal meth. Everything that becomes an addiction leads to death. Full stop. Literally.

One by one the stars winked out, vanished. The barren earth beneath her feet was all that was left, the only thing that seemed separate from the encompassing darkness. Save for her brethren, the chorus of pain that fanned out behind her, still screaming their song into the emptiness above them, trying to fill the space between the dead stars.

Being a parent and being a junkie are almost the same thing. Both pull at you with an undeniable strength that makes you feel like you’re at the mercy of something infinitely more powerful than you could ever imagine. Both things affect your health in myriad ways because they destroy your sleep patterns and come between you and eating and exercising. Both things make you tired, happy, sad, desperate, angry, and frustrated. Both things become so ingrained in your life that you can’t fathom existing in their absence.

Just like falling in love or getting old, becoming a junkie is something that happens to you over time, like a glacier creating a canyon, and it’s something you never notice until it’s too late.

Stress is an acid that corrupts your insides and destroys your mood. Stress is like high blood pressure; a silent killer that rusts you from the inside out until you’re nothing more than a husk of whatever it is you were before stress devoured you.

I listened to those who talked about education like it was the rope ladder that would allow folks like me to climb out of every hole. What they didn’t tell me is that the best thing you can do when you’re done climbing up that rope is to make a noose, insert your head, and use it to hang your overeducated-ass from the nearest tree.

every person you meet is two or three bad decisions away from being a junkie, homeless, dealing with a horrible disease, or getting a bullet to the back of the head. The kicker? All humans are born flawed, naturally defective. All you can aim for is making the right decisions most of the time so that things balance out positively and you keep your life, and your sanity, together.

The bad thing was that I soon needed more. I needed something stronger to make the world softer. That’s when heroin came in like a heroine.

I’d like to say heroin was like laying down in a field of flowers while the sun’s rays caress my face, but that’s not it. I’d like to say it’s like scratching a deep itch, but that’s not it either. I’d like to say it’s like summer vacations or Saturday mornings, but they all fall short. Have you ever felt the hand of God inside you, as if he reached his palm into your chest, caressed your heart, and nothing but his good grace and beauty pumped through your veins? Well, that, my dearest Angelica, is what heroin feels like.

addiction is everywhere. The world is rough, so we become addicted to social media. We become hooked on booze or porn. We get addicted to money and sex and lying. We become addicted to a million things that help us escape reality.

And that’s the worst thing about heroin: it gives and it takes away. It makes things simultaneously brighter and darker. It beautifies while corrupting. It amplifies things as it infects them. It makes your life more bearable as it kills you.

Humans have always had a strange relationship with the ocean. It gives and it takes away. It leads to discovery and destruction, to new opportunities and to war. The ocean carries diseases from their points of origin into new territories. It contains strange creatures and sunken ships. The ocean feeds us and we serve as food for some of its denizens. Humans have understood this forever, and our tales reflect that in a plethora of cultures.

One thing you will learn in life is that knowledge always comes to you fragmented, so it always feels incomplete, always leads to more questions. How well you get to understand something often depends on your ability to take pieces of information and build a puzzle to get a clearer picture of what you’re dealing with.

The second thing you should know about knowledge is that it’s often not comforting. Knowing things is scary. Understanding how the world works is something incredibly depressing. Seeing the inner working of society will make you see institutionalized racism everywhere. It will show you how misogyny is alive and well. It will show you how all of us who aren’t rich are cogs in a system that’s incredibly oppressive. It will show you that system has been designed to prevent us from moving up on the social ladder. You will learn that privilege is basically the idea that something isn’t a damn problem because it doesn’t affect you personally.

I write this to tell you that I love you and that no matter what goes down you and your mother were—are—the best things in my life. I write to tell you I’m sorry that I wasn’t strong enough to stop using junk when you came into this world. I swear I tried my best given the circumstances, but not everyone has the power to do things like that. Hopefully, you’ll never have to find out if you have what it takes. I write this hoping it will show you that I’m not a bad man, just did some bad things. Some dumb things. We all make mistakes. Mine just happened to be bigger, more expensive, and infinitely more dangerous than the mistakes of most others.