Chapter 2: Surrounded and Alone
“Well, the funny thing is I didn’t tell him that I have the Holy Trinity.” Natalie cackled while talking to some of the twenty-somethings in the courtyard.
Off to the side of everyone chatting, I was sitting in a beat-up camping chair trying to mind my business and enjoy the sun and its warmth on my skin. Natalie’s voice carried over to my ears and I could feel them perk up. Holy Trinity? I wondered. Even though I initially wasn’t listening, her gleeful energy in between cigarette pulls caught everyone’s attention, including mine.
“You know,” she said as the smoke slowly floated up from the side of her mouth, “Hep A, B, and C!”
Immediately my jaw dropped with a slight gasp and laugh. What? Then I had a flashback to the night before when I saw some of the “young ones,” as I like to call them, scurrying around the facility. They were trying to distract the techs from supervising so Natalie and some other kid could run off to have sex. What was another conquest for Natalie to brag about was about to become a really uncomfortable situation for that kid. Days later, he came back to us saying that he tested “positive.” Originally I thought it would be for hepatitis given Mother Teresa and her “Holy Trinity,” but it turned out to be some other STI. So maybe the joke was on Natalie? I don’t know. There were no condoms around because, of course, no one was supposed to have sex. Except they did, and clearly it was not safe.
I remember one morning coming back to my room after brushing my teeth. As I approached, I noticed that the lights were off. Hmm, did I do that? Our doors didn’t lock, so as I leaned on the door with my arms full of toiletries, I heard heavy breathing from the other side of the room and saw shuffling under the covers. It was my roommate with a particularly creepy man who made my skin crawl. I cringed when I heard him moan then loudly whisper in her ear. He definitely was not a twenty-something.
Do I interrupt? Do I tell a tech what’s happening? I knew the rules, but I didn’t know what was considered right and what was wrong. I was quickly learning during my stay that it wasn’t about the rules, it was about what I needed to get through those 35 days in peace. It hit me that my five weeks would quickly feel like ten if I had a conflict with anyone, so in that moment, I decided that I hadn’t seen or heard anything.
Before they noticed that I had walked in, I stepped out and took a seat in the common area. I exhaled, putting my face in the palm of my hand to wait. It only took a few minutes for him to come out of the room. I was not surprised.
While the techs occasionally played Whack-A-Mole trying to control the twenty-somethings, I found myself entertained in my own way thanks to another patient. No, I did not have sex with this man. I didn’t even touch him. But I still found myself distracted in his company. Our connection brought me comfort at a moment in my life when I was grieving the man I knew was permanently gone. He was no replacement, but he took me away from my pain. If I couldn’t have alcohol while in treatment, at least I could have some male attention. He was exactly what I needed for those five weeks.
I always looked forward to early evening when we could work on crossword puzzles by the tech desk. We chatted with each other and the techs, who, like Danielle, were all in recovery and helped remind us that getting better was possible.
As it got close to 9 PM, I began to dread my nightly trip to the nurse’s station. As soon as I took my night meds, the clock started counting down. Slowly my eyelids got heavier and my head started to nod off, which annoyed me. It was a nice change, for once, to actually want to be awake, but those meds sapped my energy. I was finally laughing with others after not having done so in over a month, and even more surprising, I was smiling again. I didn’t want the meds to take that little bit of joy away from me early every evening.
As we worked on the crossword one time, I looked at him and wondered, why isn’t HE sleepy? It was then that I learned from the others how to “cheek” my meds. So that night I went into the nurse’s station, took the little paper cup with my medications, emptied it into my mouth and said “ahhh” like a little kid as I stuck my tongue out so the nurse could take a look. All the while, I tasted the bitterness of the pills hidden between my gums and cheek as they started to break down. I rushed to the bathroom to spit them out before they disintegrated, wrapped them up in tissue, stuffed them into my bra, and saved them for when I wanted to go to bed. Back to the crosswords!
I rapidly fell into the daily routine. I was so wrapped up with therapy, groups, and classes that I started to forget about the world outside, the world that treatment was shielding me from.
I was vaguely aware that it was a world that seemed to have fallen apart. Every now and then, someone would flip past a news channel while looking for another episode of Botched. I remember hearing snippets of COVID’s numbers going up as the TV abruptly switched to Naked and Afraid or some other reality show. I remember being allowed to watch TV briefly while the protests broke out around the country and just miles away from where we were. Then, as soon as gunshots rang out live on TV, it suddenly became silent. TV off. A part of me was relieved to be away from it all. Away from one unprecedented event after the other as well as the alcohol that waited patiently for me.
Every week I got thirty minutes to speak to someone from the outside on video chat. I always chose my sister, Sophie. It had hurt her so much to see me struggling that I wanted to show her how good I looked the longer I was in treatment.
“You have no idea how much at peace I feel knowing you’re safe. I’ve been taking the family support classes, and I’m learning a lot,” she’d say. The facility provided classes for both families and patients on addiction and how it is a disease and not a failure of character.
I still felt like a failure, but I didn’t have to think about that in treatment. Instead, I could just relax, like I was at a summer camp for dysfunctional adults. I knew what was waiting for me on the other side of the fence. It was the people outside, those people and their opinions, that ran chills down my spine.
“Mami doesn’t know where I am, right?” I asked.
Each time I spoke to my sister, I asked if people had figured out where I was, fearful that my secret would be revealed. I just wanted people to think I was taking time for myself and “unplugging” after the loss. I didn’t want a soul to know that I was locked away in a treatment facility, that I was institutionalized.
The very idea of anyone knowing where I was made my heart race and my stomach sink fast, like a free fall with no end. I’d seen people get ripped apart publicly because of their secrets and I didn’t want that to be me. As I watched my sister chat on the screen about her days and what things have been like for her, my mind wandered to thoughts of how I would rather die than have others know where I was. I mean, how could I, this teacher loved by the community, be an alcoholic? How could I be such an extreme case that I couldn’t be trusted with my own life and had to be locked away? How could I be a good person but be hooked so badly?
It. Just. Didn’t. Make. Sense.
I didn’t tell my sister that those thoughts raced through my mind while we spoke. I didn’t tell my therapist when I looked her in her eyes across her desk. I didn’t tell anyone in my group sessions during those heavy pauses when I could have said something. I did not tell a single soul how torn I felt inside.
Even in those moments, surrounded by people just like me, I was alone.
Originally written by Jessica for Love & Literature Magazine.
Read the previous chapter, chapter 1 here.
Read the next chapter, chapter 3 here.
