I pull out my version of the wellness wheel that looks far more technical than it really is, to the point that some clients don’t attempt it because it overwhelms them. It was given to me in grad school and it’s one tool I’ve kept for over a decade. One question, you have at least three close relationships, is a section I can’t fill out to the 100% mark, and as it stands right now I’ve got one person I trust and talk to. The last message on my phone is a text to my dead uncle saying I don’t want to lose the transcript, so the message is just there to keep it at the top of my inbox. The other is from my dad’s brother, asking if I want to come on a cruise.
I had two fights (if you could call them that) recently with a best friend from high school and my dad’s oldest sister. I blocked them first. I privatized my Facebook, hid every past post from everyone and changed my name, and it wasn’t even really about them, but they took it as me cutting them off and responded accordingly. My aunt did a first and blocked me on Facebook. My bestie blocked my number. No no you fuckers, I did you first. Their general malaise and lack of care was maddening and at least with the cut off I can be sure where we stand. They affect me worse than that.
My former bestie was just released from prison over the summer and I watch her Facebook like a hawk, waiting for the inevitable casino games to start showing up on her timeline, a surefire way to know she’s using again. I kept visiting, over and over, and felt the heat flush my face when I saw she had attended a UWyo football game without me. I don’t care about UWyo football and I mention my alma mater for the degrees, not the institution.
In July she wanted me to pop her back and I found myself fearful, almost scared to touch another human, and then I did and gave her a hug and it had been so long since a hug. We’ve been friends since we were sixteen. I had this vision of her alone in prison and it turns out she talks to her family every night, they gave her everything she needed, just like right now, living with her mom and getting paid under the table.
In the afternoons when the birds have finished the seed I put out for them and I’m in between sessions, I call the one friend I have left and tell him about my aunt and my bestie and say I did it again. Then, in snippets because I can’t say it with certainty, I tell him how the conduct of my aunt and her husband has resulted in a moral injury. In my anger I squish down any dynamics of her personality and conceive of her as a Trumper, although she made sure to tell me I didn’t vote for him. It’s a slippery hate because I love my aunt very much, but she’s living with a hateful man and some things will never change.
I tell him about my bestie because we both have a history of addiction. He was arrested for meth and wore a wire to avoid a lengthy prison sentence, and I was arrested for a DUI and deferred my own sentence by completing drug court. I ask him if he thinks she will stay clean and he says no, probably not. I had asked her to help me with my business for $75 an hour and her text back was just I just got up. Four words and I went back to the years when she would leave me hanging for hours, days, in my own withdrawals, and refused me rides to the grocery store. The sleeping part wasn’t that at all. It was code for I just came out of my coma and I’m ready to start looking for drugs again.
In high school I went to school, got good grades and worked five days a week, and I bought us everything we needed. She graduated from the alternative school. She knew I was smart, but as a rule none of my friends in Gillette knew about my talent. She was forever putting men first. Now she works at a pet shop owned by a man who is a felon too, and she sent me a text once about bathing him.
She had come over most likely to bring me meth and she was forever smoking fetty from a tiny square of foil. She would take hits the entire time and I had been watching this for a few months now, having moved there in October. Before that I had watched two other friends use, and it was really uncomfortable to watch a piece of foil flutter to the ground and then watch the user slump over. In this moment, I don’t know what spurred me on to try it. Anger or fear most likely. I didn’t know how to smoke it and so she handed me the straw and then lit the foil underneath me while we were both standing. I took the hit, and then waited. It was a really weird feeling and pretty awful at first. I immediately started feeling sick but I don’t think I horked that first time. As I got hooked, that was how everyone knew I hadn’t been using long. One night in a hotel a man said oh you are really new at this, huh? while I puked in the sink.
She gave me the hit and then we drove to a house she had access to. It belonged to our neighbor growing up, who had lost both of the children she had with her first husband. The little one was kicked by a horse and died at four. The other one my dad painted a picture of, and she died from alcohol addiction at thirty five. Some man had given her this house and she had abandoned it. My sister lived there for a while and I remember her remarking how much it took to clean it up, but by the time we went in it was just awful, a hoarder’s house, and somewhat understandable. Some rooms looked almost normal. I couldn’t believe someone had a whole ass house while I was homeless. I kept looking at it wondering if I could clean it and didn’t even know where to start, but this is what I started doing when I was unhoused, looking at every structure as a possibility of a place to sleep. That unhoused shit really fucked me up.
There were four cats living there that my bestie was caring for, and the smell of cat piss, and the cats were better off than me, and I noticed my perception starting to shift, a fuzzy feeling behind the eyes and an odd alertness mixed with tiredness.
This same night I had left my dog with a lady and she ran away from her. I wandered downtown the next day to find her, and then we got a few days in a room at the National 9 through victim services after an old boyfriend pulled a sawed-off shotgun in my face.
That was where our paths split. I left for treatment and she went to prison. She’s about three years behind me. We came back together after she got out of prison, but then she started showing those old behaviors again, including that “I just woke up” text that finally tipped me over. She claims she knows everything and IOP doesn’t help.
I go to her page again, wanting so much to be right that she’s at risk for using but also not wanting to be right because I want a sober friend. I want a friend with history and I want a friend who gets better like me. This friend was folded into the tapestry of my years of using. She likes to proudly claim I don’t fuck with alcohol while waiting for her second parole sentence to end, having ended up with multiple felonies.
I start to scroll her page, paying attention to the time of each post, and with every passing week they get later and more frequent. I’m not sure anyone has ever considered doing research on the post habits of addicts but I would be the foremost researcher in the nation. Somebody has. In 2018 three computer scientists in Lubbock taught a program to predict relapse from Reddit posts, and the two feelings it tied most closely to relapse were joy and one they just called negative. I find a post by a girl I’ve never seen and click on her page. Born in 2001. I wonder what the fuck my friend is getting out of this friendship, and then I do what I do with every person I meet and look up criminal history. And, just like I had suspiciously, maybe pathologically, suspected, she was arrested in August: Failure to Pay Bench Warrant, Theft, Falsely Reporting a Crime, Possession of a Controlled Substance: Powder or Crystal x2, Driving Under Suspension x2, Destruction of Property, Failure to Provide Proof of Insurance, Interference with a Peace Officer, Using Another’s Credit Card.
Then I look up my friend’s record, looking at the charges that put her away—interference with a peace officer, hiding under the bed when the deputies came through the door, refusing to come out until they dragged her out.
I consider putting the crimes below the picture of them both and decide against it because, while I’m excited I’m right about my suspicions, I’m pissed at Wyoming. Wyoming doesn’t make staying away from other felons a standard condition of parole. The board decides it person by person. And the girl was arrested in August, not convicted. Fewer than half of the people paroled in this state get through three years without going back, and most of them go back for violations, not new crimes. Women coming out of prison overdose at higher rates than men.
The cut off of both women starts to make more and more sense. I was onto something. And then I start to realize the sad truth of it all: I’m too at risk to hang around addicts, and I’m too at risk to handle watching the abuse of my uncle. Underneath it all I miss these two women like I would miss a mother or a sister. And they act just like my mother and sister. The cut offs. The focus on my behaviors. When I feed AI every single text and story it starts to uncover the pattern. I hold back, wait, get impacted by each shitty behavior, and then eventually freak out, but within days I’m okay. This pattern ends me up isolated as shit, though.
She just posted a picture of herself and her daughter and her daughter’s daddy here in Laramie and she didn’t contact me at all. She might have called. I have her blocked.
I add my own name into Google where I know I won’t find arrest records, although they exist.
