Idiot - Laura Clery Page 0,68

could do anything! I felt so loved and in love. Every week I would go to my meeting at The Log Cabin. Every morning I would get on my knees and ask God-as-I-know-it to keep me sober for the day. Every day I would talk to other sober people to stay grounded. I was working through the 12 Steps. I was on Step 8. We made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all. ’Twas a very long list. . . . But yeah, eight out of twelve seemed pretty good. I felt like I was almost done.

But “being done” doesn’t ever happen with addiction. If I wasn’t actively focused on recovery, my addiction would creep up and become my solution to life’s problems. They say in AA that anything you put before sobriety, you’ll lose. I heard them . . . but I didn’t feel like losing anything was possible now. Slowly, I started putting Stephen first. I didn’t really notice it. As time went on, I started thinking to myself, If I can go six months without picking up drugs or having a drink, then I can afford to miss my weekly meeting. I can stop getting on my knees in the morning and asking my higher power to keep me sober. I can stop talking to other sober people.

I stopped for eight days, but those tools were what quieted down the voice of my addiction. By the eighth day of not applying those tools, the voice of my addiction started to get very loud. It wasn’t even a particularly bad day. Stephen and I didn’t have a fight; I didn’t get a rejection; I didn’t lose a job.

I was at my apartment trying to write, but I had writer’s block. Jack was at work. Damn it, what do I write, what do I write? Then I figured out the solution. Oh, I know what will help. Some of Jack’s weed. It was like an out-of-body experience. I went into Jack’s dresser drawer, pulled out his stash of weed, and smoked it. I coughed heavily. It had been a while.

Well, fuck. Now I had smoked weed and ruined six fucking months of sobriety. I might as well go buy some beer. I got some beer and drank it. Well, I’m already drunk. I might as well buy some cocaine.

I had deleted the numbers of every drug dealer I knew, but no one is unreachable in the age of Facebook! I found one of my old connects, hit him up via Facebook messenger, and picked some up.

I snorted some cocaine. I might as well smoke it, too.

Now I was finally cracked out of my mind—jittery and shaking like the crackheads you see on the street. I didn’t even feel good. The shame still seeped through the numbness. How the fuck was it doing that? The weight of my situation came crashing down on me. I lay in my bed, staring at the ceiling and feeling meaningless. I ruined my sobriety. I ruined my life. I might as well die.

I went to the drug store and bought some sleeping pills. I took seven pills. I didn’t care if I lived or died. If I didn’t wake up, then I didn’t wake up. Who fucking cares? I knew that the mix of uppers and downers had the capacity to stop my heart. It’s very dangerous to take them together. That’s how Heath Ledger died. I knew this and I didn’t care about the risk. But still, if I really wanted to die, wouldn’t I have taken the whole bottle? Come on, Laura, commit for once!

After I took the pills, I went from cracked out to knocked out. I was supposed to see Stephen that night for a date. When I didn’t show up, he kept calling and calling me, with no answer. Immediately he knew I had relapsed. It wasn’t like me to not show up to a date without calling.

Jack got home from work, saw me passed out on my bed, and just assumed I had fallen asleep. The next day I woke up and my whole body hurt. I saw I had twenty missed calls from Stephen. I called him immediately.

He answered, but there was only silence on the line. Eventually he spoke. “You relapsed, didn’t you?”

“Yeah.” I wished more than anything that I could have said no. I wished that I had just fucking lost my phone, or gotten