Not every fall begins with a shove.
Some start quietly, a whisper, a choice, a feeling you follow because you don’t know how not to.By the time Sydney and I loosened our grip on each other, I was already drifting toward the edge. Not running. Not jumping. Just inching my way into places where the ground beneath me felt exciting in the wrong ways. The kind of excitement that makes your stomach flip and your instincts go quiet at the same time.
Before the real chaos swallowed my life, there were signs. Little ones. Hairline cracks spreading just under the surface.
I didn’t see them yet.
I didn’t want to.
I was young.
Restless.
Hungry for more, more feeling, more danger, more belonging. More anything to drown out the emptiness I’d been carrying since childhood.I didn’t have the language for trauma then. Or addiction. Or the kind of voids shaped like fathers who die too young. I didn’t know how to name grief when it arrives quietly and settles in your bones instead of knocking the wind out of you. I just had a body that kept reaching for things that felt like aliveness.
The slide didn’t start with drugs.
It started with wanting.
Wanting to escape my house when Mom and Colleen fought.
Wanting love that looked like the movies, urgent, consuming, unmistakable.
Wanting boys to look at me the way they looked at Sydney.
Wanting to feel chosen.
Wanting to outrun a sadness I didn’t yet understand.Wanting anything that made my skin buzz with possibility, even if it came with risk attached.
Before the slide, there was just a girl who didn’t know what she needed, only what she craved. And every craving felt harmless on its own. A small step. A quiet yes. Another inch forward.
I couldn’t see where it was leading yet.
I only knew I didn’t want to stay where I was.And that was enough to start moving.
Chapter 7: Before the Slide
Chapter 8 Midnight Carwash Confessions
By all logic, a 24-hour car wash shouldn’t be anyone’s therapy office.
But logic never met me and Lin.
Those late-night wash cycles weren’t about dirt. They were about stopping. About hitting pause after the bars, after the ex-drama, after whole nights spent pretending we had our shit together when we very much did not.
Inside that green truck, with the windows fogged up and the doors locked, nothing was required of us. No performative smiles. No explaining. No keeping up. Just steam, silence, and the kind of honesty that only shows up when it’s well past three in the morning and your defenses are too tired to stand guard.
The automatic doors would slide shut behind us with a mechanical whoosh, like a vault sealing. Then the first blast of water hit the windshield hard enough to make me flinch every time, even though I knew it was coming. Soap dragged itself down the glass in neon streaks, the colors bending and blurring until the outside world disappeared completely.
Then the brushes came.
Rubber arms slamming the sides, thudding the roof, violent and chaotic like they were trying to shake something loose from us. We stayed quiet through most of it. That was always the rule. Save the real words for when the world was loud enough not to hear us fall apart.
One night, somewhere between the soap and the brushes, I finally said it.
“I think I’m faking everything.”
The words came out smaller than I expected. Almost embarrassed. Like I was confessing something petty instead of something that had been eating me alive.
Lin didn’t turn toward me right away. She didn’t jump in or soften it or try to fix me. She just reached over and turned the music down a notch, like she wanted to make sure she heard me clearly.
Then she said, calm as ever,
“Yeah. Maybe. But look at you.”
I waited.
“You’re still here,” she added.
That was it.
No speech. No pep talk. No reassurance wrapped in bullshit. Just that.
It wasn’t a solution. It didn’t untangle anything. It didn’t suddenly make me feel real or healed or brave. But it landed somewhere deep enough to slow my breathing, and at the time, that was enough.
When the dryer hit, that hollow, howling sound, like grief trapped inside machinery, we both went quiet again. We always did. We knew the spell was ending. In a few seconds, we’d be spit back out into the night, back into ourselves, back into whatever we were trying not to think about.
The truck rolled forward. Clean. Shiny. Ordinary.
We weren’t.
But something had shifted anyway. Something loosened. Something unsaid finally exhaled.
Sometimes that was all we got.
And sometimes, somehow, it was enough to keep going.
Chapter 12: Body Under Construction (2017)
2017 — my body broke.
Then rebuilt.
Then broke again.It didn’t happen all at once. That’s the lie people expect, the dramatic collapse, the moment where everything finally gives way. What actually happened was quieter. Slower. More humiliating.
It started with my arm. Just the left one, thank God. That’s still how I think about it, even now, as if losing partial use of one limb instead of the other somehow counts as luck. At first it was just sore. Tender. A little red. I told myself it was nothing. I told myself it would go away. I told myself I was fine.
The thing about addiction is that fine becomes a flexible word. It stretches. It bends. It starts to mean not dead yet.
The pain crept in gradually, the way mold does, quiet, spreading underneath the surface while you pretend not to smell it. Swelling came next. Heat. A tightness that made it harder to ignore but still easy enough to excuse. I kept using the arm. Kept leaning on it. Kept acting like it belonged to me.
It didn’t.
By the time I stopped pretending it wasn’t that bad, the infection had settled into the bone. Deep. Stubborn. The kind that doesn’t care how much you bargain. The wound smelled wrong, not blood or sweat or infection the way I understood those things, but rot. Like something inside me had crossed a line it wasn’t supposed to cross.
Other people noticed before I admitted it out loud. The glances that lingered too long. The subtle steps backward. I could lie to myself, but I couldn’t control their faces.
I didn’t walk into the ER dramatic. No sirens. No collapse. I walked in annoyed this had become a problem at all.
Within hours, I was being prepped for emergency surgery.
Eight weeks inside a body that wouldn’t behave was long enough for time to lose meaning. Long enough for my world to shrink to hallways and IV poles and the beeping rhythm of machines that didn’t care if I was scared.
When I woke up, my arm didn’t feel like mine.
I couldn’t fully extend it anymore. Couldn’t close my hand all the way. Simple movements suddenly required planning. Coordination. Patience I didn’t have. And still, when people asked how I was, I said it automatically.
“I’m fine.”
As if fine was a place you arrive instead of a lie you repeat until it sounds believable.
The most unsettling part wasn’t the pain.
It was how quickly I adjusted my expectations.