Six years old 

And I already knew what it sounded like when drugs walked into a room

It sounded like yelling bleeding through walls 

It sounded like voices so loud they didn’t feel human anymore

Because when the snake bites, you think you’ve conquered it,

But its venom is already rewriting your nervous system to make you crave more pain.

A little bit more. A little bit more. 

I was six years old when I moved to Florida because my parents lost custody of me for shooting up between drags of Marlboro Lights in the kitchen, track marks tracing their forearms like Copperhead bites from silver spoons.

And by age seven, my father had turned that habit into a final, fatal slumber. 

And the fangs grasp hold of your life, tearing it out of your grasp, while you push them deeper, puncturing your skin and marking more scars. 

That echo the pain 

The pressures 

The fear leeching off the addicts’ only source of comfort– 

Wrapping their slithering serpentine form around the bodies of its victims, draining the life from their constricted bodies.

Drugs don’t just damage the person using them.

They reach around the people the addicts love, like a boa constrictor suffocating its prey.

They reach into bedrooms where children are pretending to sleep, trying block the world out by hiding under pillows as cigarette smoke slithers through the cracks of the doors, and the cacophony of the clinking of the beer bottles foreshadows the shards of broken emptiness that will pierce the hearts of the hidden.

They reach into courtrooms, in the beats of the gavel echoing upon the remnants of the lives of those defending.
They reach into coffins, shutting them up and placing them in the ground where the mistakes of our lives rot for eternity.

Addiction is constantly leaking, dripping, slipping, sneaking into parts of your life you don’t want the venom to control, and when you try to wiggle your way out of the hole. 

It seals shut. 

The venom doesn’t leave all at once, 

It stays in the nightmares, the jumpscare heartbeats when a door slams too hard.

It stays in the habit of holding breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting for the snake to realize it missed its mark.

They told me in sunday school about a garden, a snake, and a fall from grace 

But they didn’t tell me the garden was my living room, and the snake didn’t just bite once, 

it had moved in.

It told my parents, and everyone else it consumes, that this fruit, this powder, this pill, this liquid paradise. Was just to make them feel..

“Better”

It was an illusion, a devastating trick

A bite that promised paradise, but delivered a wasteland. 

A bite that forced its victims out of the Garden of Eden, of happiness, of heartfelt relationships. 

A bite that broke lives, embedded fissures, cracks, chasms, chipping away at the piece of our hearts we love the most.

The bite of violence 

Of hate 

Of fear 

Of anxiety 

Of depression 

Of perfectionism 

Of alcoholism 

Of addiction.

48.4 million Americans suffer from a substance use disorder

Which runs through generations like a leaky faucet, 

its venom corroding the pipes,

Leaking, dripping, Victims, pumping in neurotoxins that cause paralysis. 

Addiction shackles its victims to a broken past.

The epitaph on a gravestone, already written.

Mourning lives already lost, three million a year.

It causes us to lose fathers.

To Lose grandparents.

Witnessing them get eaten from the inside out, cancer, from the cigarettes and alcohol addictions that held them down. Restrained, ripping them from me, watching them sink into the hole where I couldn’t reach them anymore.

No one could.

Our loved ones were pried out of our grasp and into an inescapable void.

A void where blood stains splatter the ground, 

A snake pit where screams are ripped out of raw throats,

Where tears spill, they ricochet over a desolate land of mistakes

And embedding itself into the barren soil of our soul is

The venom.

The lies.

The enslavement to addiction itself.

Abraham Lincoln told the nation “All persons held as slaves are, and henceforward shall be free.”

But he wasn't talking to the addicts because they are never free

And even when they are

Some things that are broken can’t be fixed.