Benders

With time, benders got longer and it grew increasingly harder to call it night. Long gone were the days were I would easily accept the night was over and try and get some rest. As the drugs ran out we would be aggressively texting and calling all dealers at any time of day or night. 3 am, 6 am, 9am, 1pm... didn't matter, we couldn't stop. Average bender for Alice and I was about 2 1/2 days of continuous drug use with my longest bender being 6 days. Occasionally we had other people come around and they would party with us for a night, go home and get rest , wake up and come back because Alice and I were still going. Time gets away from you quick when using, we would notice after 24 hours we haven't had any water and then your lips would start cracking and bleeding and it was to late. We would set alarms on our phones to remind us to drink, use the bathroom, change tampons and other normal human things. After about a day and a half we would try and force ourselves to eat anything, but you don't have much of an appetite and could only stomach a couple bites.

On a bender I would lose about 15 lbs. on average, which I always looked forward to. I've struggled with weight and body image since high school. I would spend my teenage years counting calories and often stayed up late peddling on the workout bike that I would drag into my room. I would starve myself into my body couldn't take it anymore and I would end up on the kitchen floor crying and eating a giant bowl of popcorn, marshmallows and anything else I could find in the pantry. So the weight loss was welcome and we would spend hours admiring our protruding collar bones in the mirror , admiring our hips and watching our arms grow skinnier by the hour. Often it felt like my legs were going to give out when I stood, I was half expecting a bone to snap at any moment. I stood up once after sitting at a table for hours and Alice watched my ankle give out out completely, folding over in 2. I didn't feel any pain until the day after I stopped partying. Then my ankle puffed up and I couldn't walk at all for a couple days.

And we stank. No matter how many times we would have a bath or shower we could not get rid of the smell. Our bodies were working in overdrive trying to detox all the drugs and chemical fillers. We knew it and there was absolutely nothing we could do, we could sit in the tub all we wanted and it wouldn't matter, we could still smell each other from across the room.

What I still find triggering at this point, almost 4 years down the road, is having curtains drawn. I have to have the curtains open during the day whenever possible because its such a huge reminder of living in these coke dens for so long. Your pupils dilate when you do coke and get really sensitive to light. We would sit there in the middle of the day with all curtains tightly drawn, sunglasses on and would throw clothes over the lamps to soften the light even more. We would literally spend hours adjusting the light and could never settle on anything. It was, both metaphorically and physically, a very dark time.

#addiction #recovery #clean