by Jahquel J
“Where are you, Mama Rae?” I called as I looked through the house. She popped her head out of the laundry room with a smile on her face.
“You’re losing too much weight. Have you had anything to eat?” she immediately wondered. Food wasn’t big on my list. It was like all the symptoms from Chemo that Ghost was going through, passed through to me. I didn’t want to eat and when food was in front of me, I felt nauseous and didn’t want to consume anything.
“I’m not worried about the weight that I’m losing. I’m worried about all the weight that Gyson is losing,” I reminded her that my focus wasn’t on myself.
“How are you going to be great for your family if you’re not taking care of yourself? Samoor is a strictly breastfed baby and it takes a lot out of you to produce milk to feed him. How are you going to produce milk if you’re not taking care of yourself?”
“I don’t know. I’m tired of trying to pretend like I’m fine. And, I’m tired of Gyson acting like he doesn’t have cancer and like I’m not supposed to be emotional or feel a certain way.”
“Well, you have to understand that he’s going through something right now. He may not want to come home from a day at chemo and see his woman upset and crying. It’s not that he doesn’t care, he just doesn’t want to be constantly reminded that he has cancer when he enters his home.”
I understood her point and could admit I had been selfish when it came to my feelings and my feelings alone. It usually took someone older to point things out to you for them to make sense.
“I’m going to try and be better about that. Samaj knows about everything.”
“Oh yeah? And how did he take that?” she pulled me over to the kitchen and forced me to sit down. I watched her stir something in the pot for a bit before she grabbed a plate, added white rice and spooned some curry goat over my rice.
“He took it well. I can tell he’s scared.”
“That boy is just like his father. He will hide his fear and work hard to maintain that tough exterior, meanwhile he’s breaking down on the inside. Make sure you check in with him and let him know that everything is alright and that you are both there for him,” she reminded me. “What about Somali? I know Rain is too young to understand, so I wouldn’t tell her right now.”
“I don’t know when I’m going to tell Somali. She’s emotional and doesn’t know how to process things without taking it personal.”
“Wonder where she gets that from?” Mama Rae laughed.
I tasted the food and took a few spoonful’s before I replied back to her. “Well, I can’t help that’s how I am. I’m trying to be better.”
“I heard about Liberty… how’s that going?”
Each time someone brought up my twin, I felt like a knife was poked right through my body. I wanted to lie and say everything was alright, but it wasn’t. Liberty was sick and needed the right help. People thought that rehab could fix and cure everyone and that was the furthest from the truth. I can’t lie and say that I didn’t believe that after she was released. To me, Liberty was back to herself and was going to go on the clean and clear path. Then, I had to think about it. She had been doing this drug for years, so it was foolish of me to believe that she would recover in just a month. This was going to be something she fought her entire life, and I had to be there to fight that fight with her. I couldn’t wake up to a phone call telling me that my sister was dead. I needed her more than she knew. She had to know that she was loved and there were other ways besides getting high.
“She’s still in the hospital. Staten has been up there with her. He told me I needed to focus on Gyson and Samoor.”
“He’s right,” she agreed. “That’s your sister, but she has made her bed and now she has to lay in it.”
“It’s hard to just leave her up there. What if she wakes up and we’re not there?”
“Maybe that will make her get her shit together to want to be better. I have a friend and I want you to talk to her daughters.”
“Mama Rae, I really don’t want to talk to anyone about this.”
“Trust me, you’ll want to sit and hear what they have to say,” she insisted. Only because I was at the end of my rope when it came to Liberty, I was willing to sit down and talk to whoever Mama Rae insisted that I spoke to.
“Okay,” I agreed.
“How’s the company going?”
“Good. I guess. I haven’t paid it much attention since Gyson got sick and since I found out about Samoor’s condition.”
“Understandable. You need to bring Samoor over here and go get some work done. It will take a lot off your mind. You love to design.”
“I can’t bring myself to focus on anything that has to do with my company. There is so much going on that it seems like that should be the last thing I should be focused on.”
“You can’t sit around and wait for the cancer to leave Gyson’s body or for Samoor’s heart condition to improve. Sitting home waiting for those things to happen will drive you crazy. Go to the office, engross yourself in some work for a few hours and I promise you’ll feel better,” she tried to convince me.
I didn’t know if going into my office was going to improve my mood. Going to work and trying to create beautiful rooms for happy families didn’t sound appealing, especially since my own family life was in shambles. For my own mental sake, I would try this because the lord knew I needed something different to happen in my life. We all just needed a small break to catch our breath.
4
Liberty
I’m commitment shy, so when my feelings get involved, I tend to run – Kevin Gates
I opened my eyes and winced at the sunlight coming through the window. My throat felt like I had sipped on a sand martini and my arms were sore like I had been fighting my way out of a cave filled with spiders. I moved my hands and saw I had an IV stuff into my hand. What happened? I thought to myself while trying to piece together what could have happened. Everything kept coming up as a blank. Like, there wasn’t one thing that came to mind as to why I was laid up in a hospital room feeling like death. Clearing my throat, I tried to reach for the bottle of water sitting on the table beside my bed. When I realized that I wouldn’t be able to reach it, I panicked slightly.
“Thirsty, huh?” an unfamiliar voice asked me. My memory was cloudy, and I couldn’t remember how I had ended up here, yet I knew I had never heard that voice before. Was it a nurse, doctor or someone that could hand me this damn bottle of water?”
I nodded my head because it hurt too much to try and talk. Laying in this bed, I couldn’t even see who the unfamiliar voice belonged to. I finally stopped trying to get the water and laid my head back onto the bed. Just trying to grab the water was exhausting me. The woman finally came into my view. She was a medium built woman with jet black hair that was pulled into a sleek ponytail. Her toffee colored skin glowed with the sun that came into the room. I watched as she adjusted my bed and I came up in an almost sitting position. She poured some of the water into a Styrofoam cup and placed a plastic straw into the cup. I had never wanted water so bad that I could smell how good that it was. When she put it near my mouth, I grabbed hold of the straw and sucked down the water so fast that I started choking. She patted me on the back while pressing the call button for some help.
The nurse entered the room five seconds later and when she saw me choking, she smiled. I wanted to yell, scream and slap her for laughing at me. Like a child, she had me hold my arms up and patted me on the back a few times before I finally stopped.
“Let me guess… you drank your water down too fast?” she smirked. “Take small sips until you can tolerate more. You’ve been getting all your hydration through your IV, so your throat has gotten quite used to you not having anything orally,” she explained. “I’m glad that you’re awake and not fighting. Let me call the PCA in here so she can check your vitals. I’ll also page your doctor to let him know that you’re up and awake,” she told me.
Fighting? What does she mean by I
’m not fighting? I was so confused. Was that the reason that my arms felt like I had been fighting all my life? The PCA came in almost instantly and took all my vitals while I looked at the woman standing in the corner. Who was she? Why was she here? Where was my family? There were so many questions that I needed to ask, yet it hurt to speak. Clearing my throat, I looked at my PCA as she wrapped up the blood pressure cuff up on the small cart she rolled in here with.
“Where’s my family?” I whispered.
She looked up from the cart and placed the thermometer into my mouth. “I just came on shift an hour ago, I can go find out and let you know,” she told me as she pulled the thermometer out of my mouth. “Your vitals are all good.”
“Thank you,” I mustered. It hurt like hell to speak.
“No need to find out where her family is. They’ll be here soon,” the woman spoke. Who the fuck was she? She didn’t know me from a hole in the wall, so why did she think she could speak for me?
“Oh okay. Well, I’ll be back to check your vitals in a couple hours. Lunch is coming up so I’ll bring you a tray after speaking to your doctor.” And with that, she left me alone with this woman.
“My name is Evelyn,” she introduced herself. “I’m good friends with Rae.”
Mama Rae was the one who sent this woman. What was her purpose of sending her? I wondered to myself. “Liberty.”
“Don’t strain your voice. Rae asked me to come and speak to you and that’s why I’m here. For any moment, you don’t want me here, I’m still gonna stay.”
“Have no choice, I guess,” I mumbled and leaned back onto the bed.
She took a seat on the chair and crossed her legs. “Do you know why you’re here?”
I shook my head no.
“You overdosed and your sister found you,” she revealed and I gasped. I thought she was going to tell me that I passed out or something. “She found you at the right time because you could have died if she didn’t.”
“Which sister?”
“Justice.”
My heart broke because Justice didn’t need any more on her plate. Then, for her to be the one to find me hurt like hell. She was the main one rooting for me to remain clean. I felt like I disappointed a lot of people.
“How long have you been using? I don’t mean since you’ve gotten cleaned, but in total?”
Shit, no one had asked me that. It had been years since I’ve been getting high. I didn’t exactly count and hold anniversary parties each time a year passed by. “Years.”
“You knew when you got out of rehab that you would go back, didn’t you?” Part of me felt like I knew I would end up back using drugs. Then, the other part of me knew I had to try and be sober. I had Staten, my sisters and Chance counting on me.
“I wanted to be clean for my boyfriend at the time, sister and son,” I admitted. My mind told me that I had to be clean for them. There was no other option, other than to be clean.
“You can’t be clean for anyone, but yourself. While you’re trying to be clean and impress everyone, you’re the only person who is suffering. Your family were content because they thought you were clean, meanwhile you were dying on the inside.”
Why did this woman know exactly how I was feeling? She hit the nail on the head. I was trying so hard to please everyone and I felt like I was the one losing myself more and more. Shit became hard and I didn’t have coke to keep me balanced. The real shit happening to me, I had to handle alone and without the comfort of being high.
“I tried…”
“Trying isn’t good enough. It’s not good enough when the people who love you want better for you. Trying only gets you clean long enough to fool your family.” Tears fell down my cheeks. She gently touched my arm. “Baby, I can see the pain and hurt you’ve had to endure alone. You’re not alone, I see it.”
I knew my family loved me and wanted the best for me, yet I still felt alone. I had dealt with so much on my own that it felt weird to depend on my family. My mother had always been there for us, but it seemed like the older we got, the less she was around. She assumed that she had raised us and that we didn’t need her, but that was far from the truth. I needed my mother more than anything and she was never around.
“I feel like I’m drowning and I have a life raft to save me, but I refuse to grab hold of it to save myself.”
She leaned back in her seat. “I’ve been drowning for years. My kids needed me and I chose to stay high over protecting them,” she looked away. I could tell speaking about this was causing her to be emotional.
I thought about Chance and how I thought I wasn’t hurting him because he wasn’t around me all the time. I thought because we lived a few hours away that I wasn’t doing harm to him. In reality, I was hurting him more than I knew. He had to live with his mother being ‘sick’ and not seeing me when he wanted because I was too high to drive, or I couldn’t function without getting high before I left. Then, I had Staten who loved everything about me and wanted the best for me. All he wanted was for me to get clean, raise my son and be happy. He wasn’t asking for the world, everything he wanted was things to make me and my life better. Instead of appreciating him for all that he was, I fought him and broke up because it was something that I couldn’t handle. I couldn’t handle looking in his face knowing that I was doing the opposite of what he wanted for me.
I looked ungrateful and selfish when I ended things with Staten and that wasn’t the case. The fun and romance of it all had faded. I could see in his face it wasn’t the love that kept our relationship going. It was his worry for my sobriety. The dynamic had changed, and I can’t blame him for that, it was all me. He went from sexing me in the morning so good that I couldn’t walk, to waking up and asking me was I good or if I needed anything. He worried about every and anything that could cause me to relapse. If I complained about the rain, he would give me a look that demanded to know if I was going to get high because I hated the rain. I wanted him to come over to hang with me, not to check my apartment and car for drugs. It went from us falling head over heels for each other to him becoming more like a sober coach. As much as I loved and wanted to be with him, I had to end things between us.
“I don’t want to hurt my son. He doesn’t deserve that.”
“Honey, you’ve hurt him and I know that. We think we’re only hurting ourselves when we’re getting high, but we’re hurting our children, family and friends. Yes, we’re doing the damage to our bodies, but what about the people who have to watch you doing it? My daughters had to sit back and watch every pill I shoved down my throat, even when I wasn’t in pain. They had to beg, plead and make bargains for me to get clean. I never listened and each time I chose to put drugs into my body, a small piece of them died.”
“How did you do it… I mean, how did you get clean? I tried. It’s hard.”
“Life is hard. Getting high was the hardest, yet easiest thing I’ve ever done. Hard because it was all I had known, easy because compared to the life issues I face every day, that was a piece of cake.”
“What was the thing that forced you to get clean?”
“Nothing can force you to get clean, babe. You have to want to do it or else it isn’t going to work. Being that you have one failed attempt, you know that. I’ve tried to get clean over a dozen times. I’ve made promises that I broke and hurt people who I cared for.”
“That’s what made you get clean?”
“I hurt my babies. I wasn’t there to protect them when I should have been. My daughters needed me and I was too worried about getting high.”
I leaned back and closed my eyes briefly. Hurting my family was the last thing that I wanted to do. Hurting them was never on the agenda, and I knew I had damage that would always follow soon as they saw my face. I could do good going forward, but all they would remember is me overdosing and almost losing my life. I couldn’t blame them because it was my fault for why they would feel that way.
“I hurt a lot of people. It’s not that I want to hurt t
hem but getting high is a way to get away from my reality.”
“Love, what is so harsh that you need to get so high that you nearly overdosed?”
“Life,” I replied. “Does it get easier?”
“Addiction is beautiful to us. We’re able to get high to escape our past or reality. However, it’s painful to our family. They have to live with the fact that they may receive a phone call that can alter their lives and force them to put us in the ground because of our addiction.”
“It’s so hard. I try to run from my past and the pain that I still feel to this day.”
“Stop using your pain as an excuse and deal with that shit. Don’t go to therapy and tell the therapist what she wants to hear. At the end of the day, she still gets paid whether you’re honest or not. Go in there and be honest. Work through your shit and heal your relationships. Stop trying to justify your reason for getting high by saying you’re in pain. No one ever said it would be easy, so do the work and make it right,” she told me.
Everything Evelyn had told me was what I needed to hear. To see someone who was once where I was brought comfort that I could battle this disease. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Yep.”
“What was the main reason that made you want to get clean?”
“Watching another woman raise my baby. Seeing my baby call another woman mommy and having to be alright with that because it was the decision I chose to make. That’s what forced me to get and remain clean. As much as I can’t get that time back with my baby, I know she’s well taken care of and is loved. The plus is being able to raise my grandchildren and rebuild the relationship I ruined with my daughters. Those are things that getting high couldn’t give me. In the end, Liberty this is your life and you’re going to do what you want. If you’re not ready to get clean, the sad reality is that you won’t get clean. I pray that almost losing your life is a wake-up call that you need,” she told me as she stood up and touched my arm. “If you ever need to talk or anything, you give me a call,” she hugged me.
