On Chipping Paint: A Portrait of Addiction at 20

Nonfiction by Amanda St. Claire

 

It’s getting that phone call and falling to your knees on the corner of Fifth Street. Your best friend’s husband dies in September and your hands dress her for the funeral. Your parents lend you a car for the drive from school in Greenville to see her in Richmond on the weekends. Richmond and only Richmond, or else. Sometimes you make it there and sometimes you don’t. Three weeks later, you get a reckless driving ticket that should have been a DUI, going somewhere you’re not supposed to again. Your fingers touch grief that doesn’t belong to you. Eastbound on 264. 

It’s driving drunk on the highway, northbound on the 13 to Norfolk. Being a hundred and twenty-one miles from Greenville and a state away from where you’re supposed to be. It’s outdoor bar patios and twinkle lights, liquids in colors you can’t remember, watching some friends you know but don’t really know dance in a kitchen to Latin music. It’s losing your keys and wallet on a beach at five in the morning, swallowed by tired sand. Life blurs in front of you and you forget things as they happen. Your own heart shrinks in your hands. 

It’s missing the third bus you were supposed to be on. Knowing that you’re stranded, again and again. This means your first Klonopin, and offers for beds that you don’t want but always take. It’s the parts of you that die in those beds, the same parts of you that die every fall. The same dead parts you’ve left in their cracked and winding palms, in light-speckled leather backseats, in skin particles that remain on chunks of forgotten asphalt of a pool deck. Another part of you dies on the military-tucked sheets and you sweep your belongings in your arms for the 6 am bus that you don’t yet know you’ll miss, trying and failing to go home again.  

It’s surviving in liminal spaces. Is this how you’re supposed to feel? Living in gas stations at three in the morning, apartment hallways that aren’t your own and Greyhound bus rides through North Carolina that never end. Wanting to go home but not being sure where that is. You exist in distant memory moments and yellow-toweled Sundays that fray when you try to touch them.  

It’s your hands, your fucking hands. Touching things they aren’t supposed to, over and over again. The stubble of his chin and his roommate’s sheets and every drink in the room that doesn’t belong to you. It’s hollow stomachs and scattered pills and the relief of your three routine drinks at six in the morning. The space between you and who you thought you’d be as a child. 

It’s that taste of loss in the back of your throat. It’s crawling out of your own skin. It’s wondering if your body is really yours. 

It’s that no one ever tells you how much it hurts to be in your twenties. How many parts of the heavy world you carry with you, the empty vessels you occupy before you find one that can hold your grief. You swallow the orange October air that clings to your skin on a gas station bench, past the lump in your throat and down to the one in your stomach, counting the nickels in your shaking hands. It’s all you have left until your dealer comes to pick you up. Eventually, you fall asleep. This moment never leaves you. 

You felt safe with them, you told yourself, so you put on your tongue whatever was handed to you and let the nights happen as they would. It had been a long few months of that; of different bedrooms and dusty windowsills, whatever thin sheets you could wrap around your legs, chips on an empty stomach and trying not to think about your life too much or you’d forget how to breathe.  

It’s feeling like that Richard Siken quote where he’s talking about falling to the floor crying. How there’s an element of the ridiculous to it because you knew it would happen, and as you’re on the floor crying you look at the wall and notice a part at the bottom where you didn’t paint it very well. This is your chipped paint moment, the inevitable outcome of your intentional self-destruction. 

It’s running out of money for bus rides.  

95 north out of Greenville.  

About the Author:

Amanda St. Claire is a senior undergraduate studying English Writing and Rhetoric at George Mason University. It has been her dream to be a published writer since she was eight years old, and she hopes this piece will be the first of many. This May, Amanda will joyfully celebrate 21 months sober.

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