Mary's stories
Subject: Hello Chris,
How are you? Well I hope.
My name is Mary and I would like to mention to you again that your website really grabbed my attention in ways that I think were meant for a reason. I am live journal user xxxx (please all I ask is that you keep that confidential for now).
Since your writings have inspired me to write and my brain seems to be feeling more on the clear creative side tonight, I’ll get right down to writing and call this Chapter 1, the Intro into the life of me.
You see, I’m 22 years of age and I have been abusing drugs since I was 14. Before I start on my few adventures, I’ll share a bit of info on my background. I grew up with 4 siblings,-two of them being brothers and the other two being sisters.
I have a twin brother and out of the five of us kids I fall in the middle (him being the few minutes older, so therefore being the second oldest).
My parents were married 18 years before my father passed away in 1996 (I’ll get into that shortly) and my father came here from Greece, specifically the island Crete when he was 7 years old making him as far as to my knowledge 100% Cretan.
My mother on the other hand was born here, and came from a (I’d like to say once again to my knowledge) 100% Polish background. So that makes me 50% Greek 50% Polish. Interesting mix! I know, I get that response every time I tell people what my nationalities are made up of.
For the most part growing up as a child, we usually had just enough to get by. Thankfully there was always food and clean clothes on our backs. We definately were not rich.
There were occasional rough times when we’d have to live with a leaky roof for months in a winter, live a day or two with out being able to afford the electricity/heat bill and having the power shut off, phone shut off, things like that.
But that did not interfere with the closeness and love we had together as a family. Even though I never got what most kids got for their birthday and christmas, it was okay. I was just happy to be with my family.
Materialistic things did not matter because I knew my parents could not afford them. Instead they showed us what is far more important. LOVE. That is something that will never ever be denied or forgotten for as long as I live.
Tragedy striked when I was 13 years of age. I remember coming home from school and me and my oldest sister (who was 16 at the time) got a call from a hospital in the Metro Detroit area saying we needed to get down there as soon as possible, “Ted (my father) is here”.
Suddenly, there was a beep on the other line meaning there was another call coming in and my sister asked the person at the hospital to stay on the line and she clicked over and it was my mother wondering where my dad was, because he was suppose to pick her up at the car collision shop so she could get her car fixed, which was going to take a few hours.
Instead she had been waiting over 40 minutes wondering why he was taking so long. Panicked, my sister mentioned immediatly to my mother that we were just informed dad was in the hospital and that she was on the other line with the hospital;-
my mother quickly made it aware to the collision shop to fix her car asap for reason of family emergency and while we waited for her to get back home my sister clicked over to the other line and demanded more information on the condition of my father.
All I remember is I felt this sudden panic inside me listening to her and I started to cry uncontrolably while shouting in the back ground “Is DAD OKAY??? PLEASE!!! TELL ME!!!” It did not help to hear my sister start to cry on the phone saying “IS HE OKAY???”
While later on she told me on what seemed to be the longest ride ever to the hospital that the person on the other line mentioned they could not reveal that information- yet sounded so speechless, and saddened.
So we get there. The hospital. We don’t know what to expect. There were numerous times when my dad was admitted into emergency due to complications of his breathing troubles (which I now think to believe was emphysema but that was never what I was told, perhaps for fear of us kids worrying).
This lady or nurse or somebody took us into this little room. We get there, and the only other person in there is my dad’s buddy Tyrone. Tyrone worked with my dad. Tyrone sat there with his head bowed and hands covering the sorrow that lurked on his face,- elbows resting on his legs.
Immediately my mom, sister and me begged Tyrone to tell us what was going on. All I remember Tyrone saying silently is “I tried….I tried” ; nodding his head.
I got down on my knees and begged Tyrone to please tell me that my dad was going to be okay, tears streaming from my eyes as if I was asking for my own life to be spared.
He finally seemed to have had a slight moment to gather his thoughts and mentioned almost silently that my dad and him were driving together, meaning my dad was picking him up and dropping him off for work every day (since for what ever reason he had no driver’s liscense) and my dad suddenly had a serious asthma attack where he could not catch his breath.
Tyrone forced him to put his truck in park on the side of the road while he ran to the nearest party store to call 911. From then on Tyrone had driven my dad’s truck to the hospital while my dad was taken away in the ambulance.
To wait. In the waiting room. I realised later on he was waiting in there 2 hours prior to our arrivement. I was in class 2 hours ago. Science class with Mr. Parmentier. Passing notes to one of my best friends about the boy I had a crush on that sat across from me. Thinking about how excited I was that my dad was suppose to take me to get these brown Converse shoes I wanted. Totally oblivious to the bad news that was going to await me when I got home. News that would change my life forever.
Time again feels like agony waiting in that little square room with dim lamps and chairs. Then there was a soft knock at the door. A preist comes in. Presents us with the news. My father had passed away. All I remember is suddenly seeing white flashes and almost fainting.
Then I started to cry out NO NO NO THIS IS NOT HAPPENING , screamed and ran out to the nearest exit doors down the hall passing people waiting in what appeared to be the waiting room. They must have thought I was a mental patient but that did not matter to me because in my mind I was dreaming, I was having a bad dream, the white flashes kept coming back.
I make it outside. I look both ways and see my dad’s truck in the lot from afar. I’m dizzy. I fall to the concrete and look up at the sky and scream NOOOOOOO GOD NOOOOOO. Every bit of feeling is now numb. I start to punch the brick wall thinking WAKE UP MARY THIS IS A BAD DREAM.
Once again the white flashes come back. I think it was my sister and a nurse that came out to hold me and say “Everything is going to be alright”. I would not let them touch me. I needed to fall on my knees and ask God why. Why must this happen to me? In my mind I was still dreaming….
Some how I ended up in this little room where a nurse tried to calm me down. I couldn’t. I remember hearing her or one of the administration say they were thinking about keeping me there over night I was in such bad shape.
Then, I finally spoke, while trying to stop shaking and choking back the tears. I had one request and that was to call my best friend and tell her the news. I remember they put one of those bowls in front of me because I guess I kept saying I was going to throw up. I practically shoved it away on the nurse thinking “just get the hell away from me”…all of you. Let me be.
I call Becky. She answers. “Mary what’s wrong?” I must have said her name like 10 times before telling her what had happened. I remember her asking “WHAT HAPPEN? WHY ARE YOU AT THE HOSPITAL?
I guess I sounded so bad she went as to so far asking me if I got raped before I could even muster a solid word. She could not stop expressing sympathy and saying sorry when she found out the news and to me sorry was not good enough. I just wanted my dad back.
That night was tough. I don’t think I could have made it or so I felt if I had not called my other best friend Amy to stay the night with me and hold my hand while spending the night mourning the lost of my father.
I was in total denial for a while. Until I went outside and realized my dogs Sunny and Spot had not yet been fed and given water because that was dad’s job. There was no wood brought in to load up the wood burning stove. Then it all hit me. It all came together. He was not coming back home. Never Again.
(I am feeling rather very tired since I have just noticed I’ve spent 3 + hours typing this and my eyes are starting to feel a bit droopy. I look back at what I had just typed and I never thought I could express this in “writing”. Next time I continue on with this I will breifly go on about the ending and move on to something else. )
(what are your thoughts so far???)
Thanks for taking the time to read.
M~*
Chris,
Hello. Thanks for taking the time to read my writings so far. When it came to writing, that was always my favorite subject in school. I use to keep journals all the time growing up. I even have notebooks of writings that I have not looked over yet since this day to see what they are were about. All the more reason for it to be more interesting when I will finally take the time to read them sometime the future :)
I fell out of the routine of writing as much as I always enjoyed and said I would do for a couple years now. I think the creativity of it comes natural to me.
I was thinking about the advice you mentioned earlier about jotting down thoughts whenever one comes to mind, and I caught myself writing a few! Seriously that is a great idea. And I suffer from A.D.D. so I know what it’s like to be forgetful. Like for example, when I was mentioning my dad’s friend Tyrone,
I forgot to mention the strong smell of marijuana that stuck to his jacket. I can always go back to edit it. It might seem like it was a little thing, no big thing, a detail that could have simply have been left out either way but it was considered an important line to be added to the memory of that day for me.
If you know what I mean. Quite honestly I am surprised how well I remember that day. But then again who could forget you know…On the other hand, well, there are going to be stories I’d like to write that might be rather, eh, lack of good memory.
I want to write so much! Even if I can’t remember clearly events due to my brain being distorted, I can always write a chapter on “Things I sort of Remember” . There I go there’s an idea :)
If you want to you can add this and other writings I’ll share with you in your personal stories as long as my real name/info remains anonymous! That’s all I ask. I’d like to know what others think of it or if by chance moved by it. How do I get a g mail account?
Okay well I am going to see if I can continue on starting a new chapter since I now feel like writing so until next time! M~*
P.S. Keep up with telling me what you think of them okay?
addict@xxx wrote:
That is a great start you have wonderful talents a writer commit yourself to writing one a day, one a week I write the best when I first wake up.
I have always wanted to write my stories but was blocked by fear, dyslexia, lack of memory so recently about a year ago I started writing the stories
now when some memories come I jot them down on scraps of paper if I have a page worth of a story i write and what ever comes I jot it down…hnece the paradise life stories later if you get some courage and give me permission of course, I can post them at http://intervention.org
in my personal stories section and email them to my freinds! We dont have to use your name and if you want we can get you a gmail account and put the email for people to correspond to you if they are so moved to. chris K
+ Part Two +
Subject:
It had been a year since my dad passed away. I was fourteen years old and in the ninth grade. My favorite hobby at the time was writing pen pals, something I did since I believe the age of 11. I had over a handful of pen pals. I could not wait to check the mail every day when I got home from school.
I had one pen pal (my first) named Jill that I had been writing to continously for a couple years. She lived in Indiana and was the same age as me. I remember though also that after all those years we spent writing each other she started to sound boring and nerdy to me.
Like she would send me letters written on stationary I could only imagine someone’s grandmother using (I know, sounds questionable, like what, I can’t explain) or even worse the Lisa Frank stationary little girls who play with Barbies collect.
She would always talk about 4-H this, 4-H that, I;m in this 4-H club I won this ribbon in 4-H ect, ect. So one day I stopped writing her because to me she was a dork. I simply just lost interest. In her and pen pal-ing all together.
I was in Junior High. I knew I was going to go back to school after summer break and be a totally different person that school year.
I use to like all the music only my older sister and twin brother listened to which mostly was rap and r & b. I started to listen to other kinds of music, especially The Cure almost on a daily basis.
I also liked Marilyn Manson, Korn, Tool, The Cranes, Nine Inch Nails, Smashing Pumpkins, and a ton of other bands. I wore (what was considered “freak” clothing) J’nco Jeans, hoodies,
and even took over wearing my mom’s Dr. Marten’s which pissed her off, because those were her special one hundred and some odd dollars shoes she got for herself to wear occasionally whenever her arthiritis from a knee accident that happened years before made it at times uncomfortable for her to walk.
I knew she would not spend that kind of money on shoes for me, and I really wanted a pair. Instead she got use to me wearing hers. I would not take no as an answer regardless of how much mad she got.
Then there’s my twin brother Eman. We were not that close when it came to being in school because I think we both were too cool to talk to each other since we had to live with each other. Or something silly like that, I don’t remember. But I do remember the day we grew closer.
The both of us were sitting at home playing the video game Land Stalker on sega genesis and listening to his Jay-Z’s Reasonable Doubt album. We somehow lightly got into the topic of cigerettes or marijuana and he had a secret to confess to me. I remember him saying
“You have to promise me you won’t tell mom or M “(my older sister) and of course I promised him. He pulls out a little bag of marijuana and my eyes widened. I asked him what does it do? I was curious because I already was into smoking cigerettes thinking how cool it looked between my fingers, all because someone
I knew stole a carton and gave it to me, and well, I was under the impression thinking it was the thing, because so many others were. My brother goes on to telling me “It (smoking pot) was not even that bad, really, it feels cool, here, take a little, try some”.
I put it in my hand and thought to myself wait a minute, this is illegal. Perhaps I was willing to trust in what he said because he was my twin brother. He convinced me to try it.
Marijuana was something that us kids in the family were fimilar with seeing growing up. My dad smoked it. We use to go for family car rides back in the day when we were all really little and I remember my dad would ask my mother to hold the steering wheel as he looked down at the newspaper on his lap and rolled a joint while in the driver’s seat cruising along.
(I look back now still thinking, how did he do that?). I did not know better as a child and I use to be curious at times seeing my dad sitting on the couch rolling a joint. I use to eat a few of the beaners and I liked the taste.
I didn’t know what they were. I knew it was kind of bad but it was not bad if my dad was doing it because my dad was not a bad person. I never had any intentions on even wanting to try it. It was just there often in my life.
Something my dad did. He did stop as we started to get older, at least stopped smoking that around us. But even after then every once in a while I could smell it through the vents in his truck.
My brother brought out a home made pot smoking bowl – the ghetto pop bottle and tin foil creation. He showed me how to use the shot gun to hold in the hit when the bottle got cloudy and then to let my finger off it to inhale the extremely smoky hit that filled my lungs and made me cough to the point of almost vomiting.
It was very easy to smoke pot in my house, I lived in an old school house and my mother’s room was downstairs by the kitchen and living room. To get to our rooms you had to go down some stairs to the family room, then there was a flight of stairs leading upstairs.
The upstairs is large enough that it could be made into an apartment. From then on we would talk about weed and I would attempt to smoke with him every time we had the opportunity to get away with it, seeing that I had not got high yet and it was going on my 5 or 6th time smoking it.
By then I was thinking I was probably the only person ever who has tried it more than a couple times and never got high!
Eman was best friends with a neighborhood kid Eric. Eric was coming over my house on a daily basis even long before the prior year of my dad passing away. Eric and my brother acted as most “boys” did their ages, when they got together they were immature and sloppy.
Eric was a pest. There were times he would not bother to take his shoes off coming in my house when there was snow outside.
Or, as this occurred almost every time he came over, with the exception of my mom not being in sight, the first thing he would do is look for food and help himself to eating all the food he wanted or to say the least, could find.
Other times he and my brother would go through my personal shit in my room and laugh at the notes they found from friends to me. They pissed me off all too often. Then this kid Neal started to come around.
Neal was friends’ with Eric who introduced him to my brother. I remember one time the three of them were laughing and acting so stupid when they were around me. Every time my brother had these two idiots over, things always looked so messy around the house.
They did not seem to respect anything, instead used my house to their advantage as a place to chill when my mom was not home. To my surprise soon enough I was about to finally find out why they acted the way they did.
One day my brother, Eric and Neal invited me to chill with them. So I said okay and to my surprise Neal pulls out this big bag of pot.
Like a baggie full. They were going to try to smoke me out but I knew that was not going to happen because I never got high trying before and didn’t think I could.
They ask me to start off the rotation and there’s a joint and a normal pot smoking bowl going in the circle.
I kept holding up the rotation because by the time I was done hitting the joint I was practically coughing up a lung outside the window, then I was expected to hit the bowl right after.
We sat there and smoked a lot and I remember I thought I threw up while coughing, instead I realized it was phlegm and spit caused by the irritation of the harsh smoke clouding my lungs.
Neal would not stop packing up the bowl, it was one after the other until they finally called it quits and had this idea to go back out riding the 4 wheelers in the snow. It was like they forgot about me and I remember yelling out the window, HEY! WHERE ARE YOU GUYS GOING! DON“T LEAVE ME!” Did they listen? Hell no.
I suddenly found myself dazing down at the blue carpet in the room. It was moving! There was a pattern I kept seeing when I looked down at one particular dot that caught my eye.
I ran downstairs and collapsed on the couch to try to relax. I was hallucinating. I hid my face in the pillow trying to think. I was totally numb. I could not feel any of my senses working correctly.
Everything around me was dead silent because no one was home. Then I started hearing voices. I started to twitch.
I found myself staring at the blinds on the window and they were moving and I kept thinking of how piano keys move when some one plays the piano.
I had to get up. I ran straight to the kitchen. I found myself scavenging through the cupboards in an effort to eat some chips or cookies and had no luck because my brother and his friends already got to the food!!!!
Then I see a big can of Family Size Campbell’s vegetable soup. I opened it quickly, poured the soup and the water into a pot and waited impatiently for it to hurry up and get heated.
I wasted no time eating it once it was warm instead of hot, like how soup is normally served. I think I ate the whole can in a record span of like 2 minutes.
I remember I could not taste anything. Even when I took a moment to pause to try to think for a second at what the hell I was doing. I didn’t care. I could not stop eating. I had what I later learned was the munchies.
After over indulging every bit of food I found from then on after the can of soup, I went upstairs and layed in my bed. I hid myself under my blankets and hoped that this feeling that I was not use to would go away, because this first time being high shit was not fun being alone.
I found myself getting out from under the covers and doing weird things like setting my alarm clock so I could try to sleep it off. I could not sleep. I could not stop twitching and hearing things.
My younger sister Jo and lil’ brother Tony come home from school. Me and my brother had a half day because we had time to study for exams the next day, which was obvious I didn’t give a shit because I was too busy trying to get high.
I was beginning to think that maybe it would have been better if I would have chose studying, rather than to sit here high as a kite for the first time off weed alone.
Me and Jo shared a room and we had the nes nintendo system hooked up to the tv in our room. I think I lied and told her I did not feel well.
I kind of felt bad also that I was high in the presence of my two younger siblings and they had no clue. Tony came in our room to join her for a game of Super Mario 2 .
I stared mesmorized by the screen and out of randomness I bursted out laughing uncontrollably to the point where I fell off my bed.
My sister and brother thought I was just acting dumb and ignored me and once again I found myself staring at the screen and laughing so hard to the point that I was curled up on my bed trying to find a way to breathe, my chest was hurting so bad. I was fucked up.
That went on for some time. Giggling. Laughing. I think they were too young to suspect I was on a drug.
Till this day I still feel bad I was forced to see them while under the influence. And my mom. I refused to face. I stayed in my room and made it look like I went to bed early for school tomorrow. I slept like shit. I was still so high.
Morning comes around. I’m in big trouble. I’m still high off the weed I smoked the day before. I have to go to school.
I’m in the class room. I could not focus on what the sentences I was reading were asking me. I saw swirls on the chalk board. The circles on the scan- tron sheet were moving. I prayed the bitchy spanish teacher would not call on me for any reason that day.
Needless to say I bombed and failed my exams and I swear I was still high the day after. 3 days I stayed high. I am not even remotely kidding.
I was 14 when I first got high….