Hello!

Remember that story from last night? Well I’m here to tell it again. Of course this version won’t be the exact same, I’m not writing word for word, I’m just writing about the same thing again. I look forward after day 4 to reading back and seeing how different details emerge and some disappear. Anyways, thanks for being here.

When I was around 6 years old things started to change in my life. My parents became addicted to prescription pain medication. Now I don’t know how it happened, because a lot of what my parents tell me about this time I truly don’t believe. My dad says he got hurt at work and a doctor prescribed them. That could be true, but my dad also hung out with some real sleezy people, so it could have been that too. That doesn’t matter. Up until this point we had a relatively normal life. Thanksgiving was spent with just my parents and siblings, Christmas Eve we would go to my moms family, then my dads, it was a long night in uncomfortable clothes with a bunch of people that pretended I didn’t exist once my parents became full blown drug addicts. Most of my family treated me as if I was the one doing heroin, and in that, I don’t really have a family. I don’t get sad when my family members die, or get sick. I don’t get excited when something good happens for them, I’ve decided that while we share dna, we’re not family. I grew up kinda everywhere, it depends what age growing up is, for me it was around 4th of 5th grade, the first time I saw crushed pills on a plate with two straws to snort them. Or maybe it was the time I found an eye glass case in my parents room and opened it to find, needles, a spoon, cotton balls, you know the “I shoot heroin starter kit”. 6th grade is where things really started to shift, the drug addiction was seemingly getting worse, and my parents became more and more desperate to make money for drugs. My dad was robbing houses for jewelry, stealing copper out of abandoned houses, he even stole a giant spool of copper from national grid once. I’m not sure what it is with heroin addicts and copper but god damn, like peanut butter and jelly. My siblings got a 50/50 split at normal. My oldest brother was a real criminal and drug addict for a while, though he’s doing okay these days. My youngest sister(who is still older than me) took the midnight train straight to hell. She’s alive, I think. I genuinely don’t know if she is to be honest. When she was 18 she was raped, and between that and parents who told her she was the fat one or the ugly one compared to my other sister, she was doomed. At 19 she got pregnant and had my nephew Nathan on Christmas Day 2005(maybe 2004). a bit over a year later she had my first niece, Karlee. Nathan and Karlee were great, and based on me creeping their social media recently, they seem okay, which is shocking. my sister had trouble with stability and holding down a job, most of the time she had the kids in her custody they were on welfare and all that jazz. At some point my sister got housing in revere, things were not great for that family but they were getting by, dad was in and out, and then my sister got pregnant again, by a different guy, then she had k’loe(pronounced Chloe, really not sure on spelling.) this is where things started to get a bit strange, my sister made friends with my women in the neighborhood she grew up in that would occasionally take the kids for overnights, the more free time my sister got the more mistakes she made, she ended up addicted to drugs, and lost custody of all 3 kids. Not too many years ago she got pregnant again, twins, they run in the family unfortunately. Anyways it’s hard to say if she was on drugs during the pregnancy but based on the kids coming out all premature and jacked up and needing to be in the icu for like 3 months id say….Drugs. If something weird happened in my family the answer is usually drugs. Anyways my sister had these kids in a sober living home for all of 30 seconds before a case worker found the kids with drugs close by. A test of their pajamas actually tested positive for meth… the kids had meth on them. Obviously this means my sister loses those kids, for the better. Now as time goes on my sister is in and out of jail, and has HIV. Been a while since anyone has heard anything but she has a hell of a record so I imagine someone would have been notified if she was dead. through the early times of all this I was living with my parents, until the last day of 6th grade, that was the day my sister picked me up and moved me to Saugus, here she would go through the courts to legally adopt me, but at a huge cost. My sister is 11 years older than me, so if I was 11 or so at the time, she’s 22 and now has an 11 year old kid. she had to work a lot, usually two jobs to get by. My parents were addicts for 5 years or so. In that time they lost the house, a business, cars, any family photos, any family heirlooms, multiple apartments and living situations. I’ve moved more times than I can count and every time I hate it more. from 3rd grade til 6th was the worst of it. They got clean around 7th grade and I began to see them again. The crime Ive seen and participated in for my parents has left me a bit damaged. My dad when he was in sober living after getting out of prison used to make me pee in cups for him so he could pass his drug tests. I wish I told him to fuck off then. I didn’t know any better though, I thought I was helping. As a kid every time I got nervous I had a stomach ache and had to use the bathroom, though often my dad would yell at me to hold it because he was busy doing some sketchy shit. It wasn’t until recently I realized that was anxiety in my gut. unregulated fear in my body, that I still deal with today.

It’s going to get better again.

If you read this, thank you for reading part two, it’s much different because different memories came up. Thanks for being here!

Where the skies are gold not gray,

J.