The Things We Couldn't Forget

Chapter 7.

Call me a hypocrite if you will, but I'm not a fan of drugs.

I've always been too afraid to try anything, knowing myself too well, to ever let my brain convince me one bit wouldn't be too much.

Rebecca was into pot.

Really, everyone was. Our town was small and boring and there wasn't much else to do but go to other people's house and drink a little and get high.

It was a weekend ritual around Faulkner. Always a different house, but always the same exact night to be had.

I'd go, sometimes, but mostly I stayed at home. Dallas was a lot like me on that. He had so many friends, his phone constantly ringing and ringing from people begging him to come out.

But parties weren't our scene.

We preferred slipping into other worlds with our books, or laying on the living room floor listening to the radio play out the same fifteen or so songs on rotation waiting for our favorite ones to come back around.

I'm not a buzz kill, but I won't do it.

Even now.

I used to say I didn't want anything to alter my mind. And as much as I know it sounds stupid, I still say that I don't.

I'm aware that the pills do the same thing. They take my mind away and drop me off someplace else that's comfortable and safe.

I don't know what other drugs would do.

I felt safe, that first time, taking the pills.

I'd been so depressed after everything unfolded the way that it did. Every single day felt like trudging through water, my limbs weighed down with the weights of my loss.

My heart was hollowed out.

My soul was barely tethered to my body anymore. I'd stopped eating, stopped speaking, stopped doing anything that used to make me happy.

Because why did I deserve to be happy? What gave me the right to keep living and enjoying life when so many others weren't given that chance?

"How could you not have known?"

I felt every bit responsible as the media wanted the world to believe.

So when my foster family insisted I see someone, I did, begrudgingly.

I had sat down in a uncomfortable plastic chair in front of a desk with a white haired man with dirty fingernails waiting for him to ask me all sorts of questions.

I was ready to lay it all down.

Give to him all of the thoughts inside of my mind and allow him to try to untangle the lost girl I was from the tentacles of misery that had begun to grip me so tightly.

I wanted to let it all out.

Maybe if I did, he could tell me it wasn't my fault. He could tell me how I'm supposed to keep living when everyone else is gone. I thought he could help me.

But he didn't.

He hardly asked three or four meaningless questions before those hands with the dirty fingernails pulled out a prescription pad and scribble the names of a few drugs across it, my name at the top.

One for the anxiety.

One for the depression.

One to help me sleep.

One for emergencies when the others couldn't keep the panic at bay.

So many pills...

But he was a doctor. He had a degree. He had his own office in a building full of other patients like me waiting to see him. He knew what was best, didn't he?