Where We Came From. Tigress Dekko

to find?

      I couldn’t bear to be killed right then and there, but I didn’t know where to go

      I went to the backyard to smoke a cigarette, my mom was there too because early evening was the coolest time of the day to mow

      I watched her go back and forth across the yard, begging myself not to say anything about the pills I had taken

      But my reality had been placed inside of a glass jar and then shaken

      And dumped back out into the world in a jumbled up mess

      I wasn’t a body or a person, but a confused, high, paranoid ball of stress

      The colors of the world didn’t look right, nothing was familiar

      I had never been high like this, nothing even similar

      I tried to relax into it, but I was far too terrified

      So when my mom sat down to join me in a smoke, I told her I thought I was about to die

      She was pissed that I had stolen from her

      She didn’t know what else to do other than supervise me while I suffered

      She made me follow her into the bathroom and lay on the floor while she took a bath

      I couldn't tell if I was overdosing or having a severe panic attack

      She didn’t want to take me to the hospital because she was convinced I would be fine

      And because if she had, I would have definitely been sent back to the hospital for the sixth time

      I couldn’t bear the thought of going back to my mental health jail

      Not when I had gotten out nearly two months early because I’d convinced the staff I had been doing so well

      For hours, it seemed, I seized on the tile floors

      My mom told me to remember this moment, remember this fear, and use it as another reason to understand that I can’t do drugs anymore

      I thought that maybe the dream I’d had the night before was a premonition of dying today

      She told me that no God would ever wish for me to die this way

      And that even she had strange dreams when she took a single pill, as was prescribed,

      I was just hallucinating when I heard a voice telling me I should die.

      After her bath we had to go to Quik-Trip to buy more cigarettes

      And I saw some shit there that I will never forget

      My mom gave me a stern talking to before she went inside: speak to no one, do not leave the car, she would be in and out

      As she walked through the doors, a young man and woman were walking out

      They were speaking as if they knew each other while they walked back to their cars that had been parked at the gas pumps

      He grabbed her arm and lead her over to his van, in my throat there was a massive lump

      Because as she turned and started to walk away, he grabbed her and threw her into the open door

      The car was already moving as he hopped in too and pushed her to the floor

      I watched the car speed out of the parking lot and started dialing 9-11

      My mom got back in our car and I told her I had seen a man kidnap someone

      She took my phone out of my hand before I could make the call

      She reminded me I was on drugs and that I probably hadn’t seen anything at all.

      I told her it looked real and that that girl had looked so scared, what if I was the only one who knew what happened?

      They did it so fast, no one else saw it. At least, nobody else had reacted

      But I wasn’t allowed to because if any police officers were to see me and speak to me they would immediately recognize that I was on something

      They’d be pissed off that I was getting them worried about nothing

      I was nothing more than a fifteen year old high out of their mind, why would they listen to me anyway?

      Did I want to call the police so they could throw me into rehab straight away?

      Or somehow get the two of us into trouble with the law?

      There was no way to justify, prove, or accept what I saw.

      So instead we drove home and my mom said we would check the news tomorrow and see if anything had been reported

      But for now, all we could do was wait for me to come down because I needed to get my shit sorted

      We spent the rest of the night chain-smoking together while I cried

      But when I told my mom that I didn’t want to do drugs ever again, I lied.

      A week or two later, I got caught stealing pills from the grocery store she worked at

      They fell out of my pants in the parking lot, my sister pointed them out, and oh boy, I have never seen my mom look so mad.

      She screamed at me the entire car ride home, talking about how if I had been caught shoplifting it would ruin her reputation

      If she lost her job there, what would she be able to do about the situation?

      Did I have no respect for her, my family, or the problems I could have caused?

      What was the point of spending three and a half months in the hospital if I wasn’t going to stop?

      I was wasting my life away

      She didn’t know what else she could say.

      Did I want to be a person that no one could ever trust?

      Did I want to be a person that made it hard to be loved?

      Where I was heading was a life of crime and likely jail

      She was angrier than a July thunderstorm hurling golf-ball sized hail

      She had already had to help raise two druggies

      Did I want to be just another junkie?

      Another fucking statistic? Was I just waiting for the day I actually overdosed?

      “Between your family, your friends, your life, and your drugs: Who do you love the most?”

      So I wrote and signed a contract saying I wanted to be more than a drug addict

      And after one last relapse a few weeks later, I finally kicked the habit.

      It’s a heartbreaking thing to be standing in your mother’s room and seeing it in her body language and in her eyes that she is absolutely exhausted from having to beg her child to understand that their life is worth living

      I’m sure I broke her heart a thousand times, I don’t know how she kept on being so forgiving

      But that day was one of the first times I realized how I was seen in the world:

      Just another fucked up girl

      If my mother could look at me and ask if all I wanted her to see was a junkie,

      Then what did everyone else in the world see?

      I didn’t want to be a neighborhood crackhead that hangs out at the gas station, that wasn’t going to be me

      I made that decision when for a split second, I saw my reflection in my mom’s eyes and that was all I could see:

      An addict.