Hitting Rock Bottom.
Hitting Rock Bottom.

A short story on addiction.

Photo by George Pagan III on Unsplash

“The addicts I work with need to be fired,” he said. “They need to hit rock bottom, so they can get better. They need to hit rock bottom faster.”

Dana was surprised to hear Eddy say this. He was a heroin addict working on his recovery. He had just gotten a job in a restaurant. She had expected…something softer. More empathy.

Dana raised her eyebrows and thought of the addict in her life — a distant older aunt who didn’t come to family parties anymore.

She always had a job. She always seemed to be well-connected enough to get prescription drugs. And so decades had passed and she still had a job…just part-time, but still…and a mortgage, and a car, and all the things that suggested a person was fine. She had never stolen anything to pay for drugs…not that Dana knew, anyway. She had never been to jail.

She never hit any rock bottom, and probably never would. There were no interventions. She would just abuse pills until she died, probably. She was going to retire soon. What would happen then?

So maybe there was some truth in what Eddy said. Maybe, in some way, a rock bottom was necessary.

Dana didn’t want to think about it too much. Because then she would have to think about the fact that her family never had an intervention, never acknowledged the addict right in front of them, never did anything except talk about her behind her back about what a shame it all was, how smart she had been, how she could have had kids if she had kicked the habit.

That realization lifted her out of her body a little bit. Filled her with shame.

Because in-between thriving and rock bottom was this other area, this whole spectrum of grey…of a life sort of lived, a life that revolved around drugs but was still cushioned with suburban, first-world comfort.

Something about that hurt in a funny way, like hitting your elbow, or when your foot fell asleep.

Eddy had hit rock bottom. He had gone to jail. Lost friends. Stole. Broke trust with relatives. But now, he had a determination. He seemed more awake. He had begged for forgiveness. He had begged his friends, his family, and many gods. Something deep inside him had changed.

Dana’s aunt had just stopped coming around. She had faded away. There were no clear lines of despair or of progress. There was just a slow and steady drift into a premature grave. A slow and steady drift toward a life of solitude, a life that would only revolve around the next prescription. She had decided, somehow, long ago, that she was going to medicate herself into a comfortable death.

Her own family was hesitant to use the word “addict” because, to them, that word implied criminal behavior, and everything she had done was legal. That word implied poverty, and they were middle-class. That word implied brownness, blackness, otherness, and they were white.

Not everyone ever hits rock bottom, Dana thought. They just drift, they just barely function, they just shuffle through, and because they don’t need help, they’ll never get it.
['Lisa Martens']
['Short Fiction', 'Fiction', 'Drugs', 'Short Story', 'Addiction']