Honey Yellow

“I was born an addict. I didn’t need a tox screen at birth. My veins were pure and my blood was clean. My mother didn’t use during her pregnancy, no dirty needles, no dirty noses. But I was predisposed. Aunt Nancy killed herself at nineteen. A daddy that beat her and a mother bound to hospital beds with a fading memory. Grandpa drank too much and grandma shoved poison in his IV until he quit struggling. Uncle Pete was an angry man and Sue made homes of empty cans and prescription bottles strong enough to push away anyone who once loved her. Aunt Kathy was a hypochondriac who thought her cure was in the pavement at the bottom of the bridge, so she jumped. Uncle Tony had a dissociation from the world, an itching need to dominate, and too much time alone with his nieces and nephews. Mammaw had heart disease from working too many hours, worrying too much and never being able to sleep. Daddy was a runaway, a train hopper, eternally stained with black eyes and bruised rib cages. It was no big surprise that by ten I had taught myself how to make a noose out of a belt, by eleven I was stealing pain killers and by twelve I was sneaking whiskey and letting people touch me. By thirteen I had a dozen broken pencil sharpeners even though I only wrote in pen. At fourteen I stole box cutters from the art room in my rehab center and by fifteen I played the radio in the bathroom with my fingers down my throat. At sixteen I had met three people who didn’t care that I said ‘no’ and by nineteen I had met five. By seventeen I had fallen so deeply in love with someone that I began to hate myself. I lost my identity so intricately in her that when she walked away, I had to open my veins to get her out of my system. At twenty I relished in the way amphetamines felt in my sinuses and drained down my throat for hours and I worked so many days in a row for that promotion that my organs caved in. By twenty-one I spent a thousand dollars in a month on liquor and that pretty girl with sad, cerulean eyes. I picked every flower I saw on the way to her porch and saved the thorns for myself. At twenty-two I spent one day drunk for every year I had been alive and I pretended not to notice my parents hiding the keys or locking the medicine cabinet and hiding the pencil sharpeners. I never battled with just one demon. I collected vices like charms on a bracelet. I may have been brought into this world with untouched veins and virgin blood but I was born on a low limb of a poisonous family tree. No wonder I’ve made a home of rock bottom.”