Extracts
Break On Through - Americanized Version 1998

Written by LA VADE aka Rapsodomy © 1998
Chapter 27 - Beautiful Friend, The End

It was over.
The roller coaster had crashed.
I sat in the parking lot for what seemed like an eternity, too stunned to cry. I couldn’t take it in. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do next. The thought of going home was, at best, depressing, and the thought of going clubbing appalled me. I just sat there. In denial. Staring at the door of the club, praying that it would open and he would be standing there, miraculously, smiling his beautiful smile. I waited forever and I waited in vain.
Drazik was sent to Jacksonville State Penitentiary and that’s where, a few weeks later, he died, hanged in his cell.
I experienced every negative emotion known to man in the split second I found out he was dead. Horror, sorrow, agony, anger, hate. Those same emotions hounded me for months afterwards, dogging my every waking moment. I tortured myself with what ifs and sank ever deeper into the comforting, numbing blanket that drugs and drink provided. The pain was unbearable, I was not only bereft, I was destroyed, I felt that, inside, I was dying. I was where I’d said I’d wanted to go. Hell.
I had thought Drazik and I would die together, but just how could I have imagined for one second that he cared for anything or anyone other than himself?
I spent all my money on drugs and spent my time as fucked up as possible. I went on three day clubbing binges with the rest of the mourners, who were individually embroiled in his or her own misery, and, when clubbing was no longer effective at blotting out reality, I went on even longer solo binges. I wallowed in it.
Though I spent those months catatonic, like a zombie. my life, or a shabby replica of it, carried, numbly, on. I went to work on autopilot, like an automaton. Like a sleepwalker, I creeped, fleetingly through the doors of the gym, and, apart from the drugs and drinking, did little else.
Summer had quickly turned into winter, and I found myself with another pressing problem, one that wouldn’t go away. Every Christmas, the gym hosted a show in the town hall, where body builders gathered to compete with each other. Months earlier, I’d been foolish enough to allow myself to be entered into the competition. I did not want to deal with this but I knew that backing out was not an option. The show was literally weeks away and my training schedule was, like me, in pieces. It was, I felt, a lost cause but I bought a skimpy bikini and some fake tan. I even choose some music, (The Doors’ 20th Century Fox) and tried really hard to choreograph a suitable routine. In the end, fate stepped in and spared me the embarrassment of an on-stage disaster, as, two days before the show, I broke my shoulder, in four painful places.
I’d foolishly climbed a tree after a party I was at spilled out into a near by park. I was so high on suicide cocktails that I had actually believed I was invincible. It didn’t occur to me that I could be physically hurt. My mental anguish encapsulated all my thoughts. Ironically, as I came crashing down to earth, I actually did, come crashing down to earth. My broken bones will never heal and they hurt like hell but they probably saved my life.
This pain was real. Realer than any other I’d ever experienced or imagined. It was a much greater agony than the agony I felt inside, and it was my salvation. The physical pain seemed to open up my mind again and it cut a clear path right through my depression and nihilism. I didn’t want to die anymore, I wanted to survive, but, even more than that, I wanted to be real again. It was like I was suddenly seeing my life from the outside, saw how badly I’d been treating myself, like waking from a nightmare. I’d been asleep. I’d had my eyes shut. I’d been blind. I had turned on and tuned in but now it was time to drop out.
Over the following months, I took my time, I re-navigated, reassessed and re-evaluated my entire existence. I got tested for pregnancy and infection and thankfully was spared in both departments. However, I’d learned some harsh lessons, love was sometimes hard, life was sometimes hard, but I also learned not to blame myself for just being human. I’d taken out my hatred on me, made my victim my head, my heart and my soul.
I was so full of hate, God alone knows where it all came from and God alone knows where it all went. I’d hated everything and everyone and more than hated, detested, my own godforsaken life. Nowadays, when I look back at that time in my life I sometimes try hard to remember things I know I should forget and I sometimes try hard to forget things I know I should remember. I pray it’s all over and that I never have to go back down that road again, never have to see what I saw there and never ever be again, who I was there.
These days, I get by in my own way. I'm trying to slowly work my way back into the hearts of my family and the friends that I lost and I still go to the meetings, the 12 steps, one day at a time. I'm sober and alone yet I’m mostly happy to see a new day dawn, but then again; maybe I’m just glad that yesterday is over.

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Written by LA VADE aka Rapsodomy © 1998