Since this is my story, I think it’s important for you to know a bit more about me.
Although you deserve the truth and I will give it to you, I hope you don’t judge me too harshly. I would like to think that I am a good person who has made some terrible choices. They each made sense to me in the moment, but bad choices don’t add up, they multiply. Before you know it, things run completely off the rails.
Of course, maybe I am deluding myself. I can only see the world through one set of eyes, and I am fully aware that each and every one of us, sinner or saint, is the hero of our own story. Maybe it is the height of sophistry for me to claim that the good things I have done define me while explaining away my mistakes.
On second thought, judge me however you see fit.
I was born and grew up in a town of fewer than ten thousand people in the Great Plains region of the United States. On the off chance that anyone ever reads this, I won’t identify the specific town because I have already inflicted enough pain on my family. I don’t need anyone poking into their lives. The main industries in the area were agriculture and petroleum. We used to have a couple of factories that provided good jobs, but they were boarded up and the jobs were moved overseas. High school football was a second religion for most people.
Our two parent household was solid working class. I was the youngest of three boys. My other two brothers took after my father. He made his living with his hands, working on pumping units in the oil fields. Weekends were spent hunting, fishing, gardening, drinking beer, grilling food, watching football, playing cards or pool or cornhole. My mother worked as a cashier in the local grocery store, then later at Walmart after it destroyed most of our local businesses. She was devout, dragging all of us to the nearby Baptist church every Sunday, even during the NFL season.
I was the youngest. My brothers were older by eight and ten years. They were popular and athletic, and they took to our family lifestyle with exuberance. Both served in the United States military.
My oldest brother died when the Humvee he was riding in was blown up in Afghanistan. Our town had a parade for him.
My middle brother returned home after serving our country and married his high school sweetheart. Last time I heard from him, he had started a company that built pole barns and they had four kids and were very content with life. That was some time ago.
I was nine years old when my oldest brother died. I remember the knock at the door. Answering it, I saw two men dressed in fancy military uniforms. They asked to speak with my parents. Even at that age, I knew what was going on.
Before my brother died, our family was happy. Afterwards, it was a lot more hit and miss. Dad drank more, mom cried more, and they both fought more.
It didn’t help that I failed to fit the family mold and that my parents were at a loss about how to handle me. Sure, I participated in enough of our normal family activities to become somewhat proficient in most of them, but my heart was really not into it. I was much more a creature of the mind.
I read voraciously on a wide variety of different subjects, although my primary loves were Fantasy and Science Fiction. When my father was angry, which in later years was often, he would rail against all the time I wasted playing “those damn video games.” I think it shamed him that I was a mediocre athlete. In his mind, I needed to go out, experience the world, get more exercise, get good at a sport. According to him, I was wasting my life away. I didn’t see it that way. I liked what I liked.
One time I heard my parents arguing, each blaming the other’s family for my “weirdness”. That was a real boost to my self esteem, let me tell you.
Thankfully, even in my small town I was able to find my tribe. Sure, it was a group of kids all the “normal” people in town thought were weirdos, nerds and misfits. We would spend our free time playing tabletop roleplaying games, having adventures in Middle Earth or outer space or a post-apocalyptic world overrun by hordes of zombies. We were the best of friends, but ultimately I would lose them, too, when my drug addiction caused me to view them as objects to be manipulated instead of people to be treasured. At some point they just had enough of me.
It’s probably no surprise that I left home as soon as I could. My grades and test scores were good enough to get a moderate scholarship at a small state school a couple of hours away. I was so eager to leave that I enrolled in summer school immediately after high school graduation. I studied computers and philosophy and psychology and thought I wanted to work with the development of artificial intelligence.
I believe that when many people go to college, they intend to either change the world or save the world. I certainly wanted to make my mark on it. Maybe in the back of my mind I thought I was going to save us all from Skynet.
For a couple of years it looked like I had a chance to be successful. I got good grades and my professors liked me. I submitted projects for some student AI challenge competitions and won a couple of awards. Even my parents were proud of my success.
And maybe in some parallel universe I kept right on learning, succeeding, and advancing. Maybe in that universe I would have founded my own startup and retired with a few hundred million dollars at forty five, having made that mark on the world.
But in this universe, I met Sara. Prior to Sara, I had dated some, had a few hook-ups, but never had really fallen in love. I fell for her hard.
We started talking at a party my third year. I knew who she was because we had a bioethics class together, but I thought she was out of my league. She was smart and funny and so punk. She was irreverent, outgoing and beautiful. And I was “Generic” James Smith. Absent the courage granted to me by far too many Natty Lights, I never would have had the guts to talk to her.
Now, it’s not like physically I am some hideous monster. I am self aware enough to know that I am not bad looking. I am also self aware enough to know that I am not good looking. I am a little taller than average, and at the time I got together with Sara, I weighed around 185 pounds. Much, but not all of it was muscle. I was reasonably fit because of the strip mall McDojo that I had joined my first year of college. I did, however, like my pizza and beer. Let’s just say that I was working on a solid foundation for a dad bod.
My people are German and Irish. I have dark hair and green eyes and my most prominent feature is probably my nose, which has been flattened a few too many times by my older brothers. Other than that I am pretty unremarkable. I don’t stand out in a crowd.
No, my real problem was that I had no idea how to talk to a woman that I was interested in. For example, take my drunken approach to Sara. I wracked my brain for half an hour trying to come up with an impressive opening line or gesture. All of us inexperienced, socially awkward guys have it in our head that we need to be scintillating conversationalists. We need to show how damn smart we are, how original, how creative. That’s because we view romantic comedies from the 1980s and 1990s as how-to manuals. And that’s why we scare so many people off.
My plan was doomed to fail from the beginning, yet it didn’t. My drunken mind recalled an episode of the Ken Burns documentary The Civil War. Part of it highlights a letter that Major Sullivan Ballou wrote to his wife foretelling his impending death. His wife’s name was Sarah. It is haunting and beautiful. It was also wildly inappropriate to use as a basis to meet someone I had never talked to, had not married, and who was not alive in the 1860s. My mind was too well-lubricated, however, to engage in anything that resembled critical thinking.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
Yes, I was so lame that my plan to interest a beautiful woman was to throw out some lines I picked up from a documentary shown on public television.
My delivery of the part of the letter that I selected was haunting, but it was not at all beautiful. What I meant to say was cringeworthy. What came out of my drunken mouth sounded like the garbled ravings of a madman.
But rather than running away, she just laughed and asked “What the hell was that?”
I tried to slink away but she wouldn’t let me, following me across the room and repeating her demand for an explanation. So I eventually drunkenly stammered out my plan, and she laughed harder. So much harder.
Between gasping sobs she forced out her words.
“You really thought that would work? I think I’m going to pee myself.”
Then she asked if I was able to have a normal conversation. I stood there, my face beet red, and sheepishly admitted I believed I could. We started talking and we kept talking until the sun rose the next morning.
It turns out that we had quite a few things in common. She was a gamer, and was actually an internet streamer for awhile, but confessed she never made any money from it. We read many of the same authors. We had grown up in similar small towns. I made some little jokes and she laughed some more, this time with me instead of at me. And when the night was over, she hugged me goodnight and gave me her number.
To the obvious surprise of both of us, we quickly became inseparable. My grades suffered because my main course of study became Sara, and she and I were in love. I would do anything to please her.
Pleasing her was sometimes pretty difficult, though, because she was prone to periods of melancholy. During these times, she would cry often and sometimes had real trouble getting out of bed to make it to class. When I couldn’t make her happy, make her smile and laugh, I felt like a failure.
And then she found meth.
One of Sara's friends from back home introduced her to the drug. Sara said it made her bad times better, and she wanted to share those better times with me. Yes, it was classic self-medication of her depression. I didn’t want to lose her, so I decided to try it to make her happy. How fucking stupid of me.
Although my mind was reluctant, my body was immediately an enthusiastic supporter in a “where have you been all of my life” sort of way. First we used on weekends. Then we used during the week, but only once in a while. It soon became every day, then all day.
We would stay up for several days in a row, making grand plans that never had a chance to come to fruition. I acquired a whole group of new friends who were not the kind of people you would bring home to meet mom. One of the dirty secrets of addiction is that those who have lost everything need to attach themselves to someone else early enough in their addiction not to have lost it all yet. Addicts still have to meet their basic needs. And when that next person loses it all, then it’s time to find some new recruit. It’s like a form of chemically-induced social vampirism.
The friend who introduced Sara to meth was named Audrey. Audrey’s boyfriend, Kevin, was our dealer. Soon enough, they had nowhere to live and we had some new roommates in the apartment we had begun sharing with each other.
I ended up dropping out of school. I ended up lying to everyone I knew. I borrowed money from my friends and family that I never intended to pay back. I started stealing stuff at stores, hoping to sell the items for pennies on the dollar to someone so I could pay for drugs. Then, I started stealing things from people I knew and loved. I alienated everyone who cared about me.
I lost weight. I looked sickly. So did Sara. She was not nearly as beautiful anymore.
We fought when we were high. Kevin would always take her side, no matter how unreasonable she was being. I could see what he was planning but I was powerless to stop it. After all, he had the connections and he supplied the drugs. That didn’t stop me from fantasizing about hurting him, or doing worse than hurting him, but I wanted those drugs. I needed those drugs.
We were always out of money. I was relieved when Kevin took pity on me and let me make some deliveries for him in exchange for some cash. One night I went to an apartment to deliver a half ounce of meth to a customer. As soon as I left the apartment, I saw police lights split the night directly behind me.
I didn’t think I was breaking any traffic laws. I hadn’t even traveled a block from the apartment when I got pulled over. Two police officers approached me. Another police cruiser arrived as backup. I was ordered out of the car at gunpoint and placed under arrest for distribution of methamphetamine. I had walked into a classic buy-bust operation.
Although I initially thought that the customer was a snitch, it turned out he was an undercover cop. In retrospect, now that my mind is clear I know that Kevin set me up and I know why he did it. He had to have known what he was sending me into.
Of course, that’s not what I thought at the time. I was too shocked and my mind was too muddled to come to that conclusion. I believed I was just unlucky, just at the wrong place at the wrong time.
The police officer who arrested me kept trying to get me to roll on my supplier. He told me he would put in a good word with the District Attorney if I cooperated. I couldn’t, though, because I was worried about Sara. I still loved her and I did not want her to get in any trouble. If Kevin was arrested in our house, she could get charged too. She might even get hurt if the police served a search warrant and one of the cops was trigger happy.
Sara visited me in jail. She told me that loved me and that she would wait for me.
“Stay strong,” she said.
I told my public defender to get me the best deal that he could. With little criminal record, I ended up pleading guilty to the distribution charge because the prosecutor agreed that if I did, she would not oppose my request for probation. The judge followed the recommendation and I was released to probation, a convicted felon.
I had months of clean time in jail before I was released, and I had started seeing things more clearly. The court sent me to treatment. After treatment I lived in a halfway house. I knew I had ruined my life, but I thought I could recover. I didn’t want to go to prison, and I didn’t want to keep living as I had been. I made plans to convince Sara to get clean with me. I thought that together we could still make a life for ourselves.
Don’t get me wrong, though. It wasn’t easy to stay sober. It was a daily struggle. I still wanted to get high. There was always a voice in the back of my head scheming, trying to find some way that I could use again and get away with it.
When I contacted Sara after release, it was against the terms of my probation. The judge had ordered me not to associate with habitual drug users. Despite risking having my probation revoked and being sent to prison, I called her anyway. My original plan was to meet her in a park somewhere so we could talk things through, but for some reason she insisted that she would rather meet where there were more people around. That should have been a huge red flag but I was too oblivious to notice. She met me in a busy Walmart parking lot on a bright and sunny autumn day. My heart sped up when I saw her approaching. I was so happy to see her. As she approached, I felt like a missing part of me was restored.
When she got closer, though, and I got a better look at her, I was filled with trepidation. She was not smiling and was clearly high and looked worse than ever. She was emaciated and drawn out. The spark that had attracted her to me seemed faded. She flinched when I hugged her.
We stood by one of the cart corrals. She was jittery, continuously scratching herself and picking at her arms. Was this how I had looked? How I had acted?
As soon as she leaned against the metal rail of the cart corral, I started talking. I began pouring out my hopes and dreams for us, my vision of a better life, but every word seemed to make her more agitated.
After just a few sentences, she interrupted me and blurted out “I’m with Kevin now. We love each other. I’m not sorry because he treats me better than you ever did. I never want to see you again. Kevin told me to tell you that if you bother us he knows plenty of guys who will be glad to fuck you up.”
Then she stood up and walked out of my life. I glanced around to see if anyone had noticed our conversation. All I saw was a woman walking back to her car. She was carrying one of those wooden signs with a cheesy affirmation on it. It said “Live the life you love and you will live a life of love.”
Stay strong, my ass.