On the Savage Side

by Tiffany McDaniel

When it’s inside you, it does turn the savage side beautiful. Nothing feels bad here, Arc. All the sadness goes away. The warmth washes over you. It’s the most magnificent thing. It makes me feel like glass. The way it breaks me into pieces. But I love being broken by it. Because the next time I use it, it makes me whole again and it holds me so tight. It loves me. It’s a friend for a thousand years.

It’s a father who’s still alive. A mother who hugs me. It’s Mamaw Milkweed coming back with the flower bulbs. Your stories weren’t turning anything into the beautiful side, Arc. This stuff does.”

Just as then, this was a new monster she couldn’t fight without me.

I didn’t prepare myself for the feeling. The overwhelming sense of peace, the warm wash of euphoria that took every single drop of my pain away. I never knew such a feeling could exist. It spoke to me. Told me it would protect me, keep me safe, and close the doors on all the things that had once hurt me. Sweet lies that glistened, and I believed them.

It was a single moment that made the idea of returning to life unbearable. That was when I knew why some people did it.

That urge to be free from the truths that hurt too much to know.

We humans have always been in pain. History tells us that in the artifacts civilizations have left behind. Pain is there in the broken vases, the fractured poetry, the overwhelming music we have played for centuries. We belong to grief until the engine goes out. Then we belong to the dirt, our bodies identical to other fallen things.

As it coursed through my veins, I felt removed from this pain. This is the unattainable feeling it gives you. This is the trick it plays. What it...

“So we can kill the monster together, Daffy.” She smiled. I have never forgotten that.

Lives lost to addiction are not always because the victim was the addict. Sometimes you die because the person you love is one. In Daffy’s case,

that was our mother.