Last summer I found a small box stashed away in my apartment, a box filled with enough Vicoden to kill me. I would have sworn that I’d thrown them away years earlier, but apparently not. I stared at the white pills blankly for a long while. I even took a picture of them, before (finally, definitely) throwing them away. I’d been sober (again) for some years when I found that little box, but every addict has a little box—metaphoric or actual—hidden away. Before I flushed them I held them in my palm, marveling that at some point in the not-so-distant past it seemed a good idea to keep a stash of drugs on-hand. For an emergency, I told myself. What kind of emergency? What if I needed root canal on a Sunday night, say? This little box would see me through until the dentist showed up for work the next morning. Half my brain told me that, while the other half knew that looking into that box was akin to seeing a photograph of myself standing on the edge of a bridge, a bridge in the familiar dark neighborhood of my mind, that comfortable place where I could somehow believe that fuck-it was an adequate response to life.
5 responses
A million times yes.
To always remember where I was.
Isn’t it?
Just FYI, please do not flush medications down the toilet. They end up
in the water supply system where all the rest of us (and the fish) end
up ingesting them. (You might scoff at the idea as paranoid or
conspiratorial, but it’s not:
http://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/features/drugs-in-our-drinking-water )
The best way to dispose of medications is to have them incinerated
and many cities have places you can drop off meds for disposal. But I
understand the temptation and how you might want to get them away from
yourself immediately. If that is the case, mix them in something
unpalatable to animals and humans, seal them in a ziploc bag and throw
them in the trash.
I had bottles stashed all over the house (including my infant daughter’s room). I thought I was terrified of running out, but I was actually just terrified. I’ve been sober more than a couple years now, and alcohol fishy bother me. It’s not worth what I would sacrifice to get to where I already was. The train that is alcoholism goes one direction only, and the last stop is horrible death. Glad I got off when I did.
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