Shattered Fae

In the Trenches

God I wish I could go back and un-screw up the things that go screwed up for both Henry and me in the first place. Maybe we would not have been friends but at least we would have had a better time growing up. Not have to go out and experiment with drugs because we were so depressed. And what adult would pay attention to a couple of juvenile delinquents that only cared about the next time they got high. Let me tell you sooner or later no single drug is enough. I have done coke, meth, crack, heroin, sunshine, mollie, ritalin, adderall, ecstasy, vicodin, percocet, man the list goes on and on. My dopamine and serotonin levels are screwed because I didn’t want to be hurting anymore. I had never been taught a constructive outlet for pain, sadness, anger, every emotion I was inadequately prepared for. I found myself looking around for someone to blame, but who could I blame when I only ever found myself. I started hating myself because I thought I was the one f*****g up, I mean I was, but before the drugs and corruption. I blamed myself for not being smart enough or wise enough to know how to take care of my own well being and all these different emotions racing through my brain, soul, and heart.

I cracked under pressure, I could not deal with every day to day life. Some may call me weak for that but I was able to rise up out of my jaded past and become a stronger person in the long run. Now I think I have more mental and emotional dexterity than most of my peers. Which is more of a benefit for me in my opinion.

Even being beyond my years in that aspect wouldn’t have saved me from this.

I woke up one morning and looked around my room from the comfort of my bed seeing my Spider-Man posters, various band posters and pictures of my sister and I as young children. A wave of sadness hit me. Here I lay in my bed on my sixteenth birthday and still I hadn’t seen Josie. I decided to hell with it. I am not going to sit around and wallow in this sadness about someone who isn’t here. That day I had pretty much decided that I would think of Josie as a dead relative. No point in worrying about what she is doing if she is thinking about me as much as I am her. No need to do that. I got up, took a shower grabbed a random band t-shirt and noticed it was my Jukebox Hero shirt. “Great song by Foreigner,” I thought. Grabbed some boxers, a pair of jeans, my trusty worn out, torn, faded, and marvelous Chuck Taylors aka Converse. I got out of there — and to steal a line from my homie the Fresh Prince “I sprang with a quickness, like lightning, disappeared.”

I just needed an escape. I smell the familiar Oregon rain before I feel it or even hear it. I walk all the way out of my doorway and embark on a quest to remember to forget everything that I know and love. I am walking down the stairs of my puke green apartments while I feel the cold drops of water patter against my head and drench the ground. Walking to the bus stop all I can see is grey and green everywhere around me. Today everything has lost its color and meaning. As I wait for the bus to arrive I pull out my pack of Marlboro Red One Hundreds, pull one out, put it to my lips, I notice my hand is trembling.

I need an escape.

I grabbed my lighter and spark up that stoge. I inhale that toxic smoke caressing my lungs as the tar seeps into my body, hinting for the addiction to last longer and make me feel better. My nerves are calmed but I am still on edge. Every drag of that cigarette takes me a step closer to where I need to be, my second home, Downtown Portland.

Finally after what seemed like hours the bus pulled up. I grabbed my wallet, flash the driver my bus pass and walk on to the back. I see people from all walks of life laughing and spending their day joyously. I hate them all. I grab my headphones and plug them into my phone — for now my escape to music will do just fine.

“Hello there, the angel from my nightmare. The shadow in the background of the morgue. The unsuspecting victim —“ the music blasts in my ears.

I Miss You by Blink-182 is playing. Wow music thanks for playing a song that helps me soak in my reality when I am desperately trying to avoid it. I change it. Although I love that song the torment it is making known to me is unbearable. Ahhah! I’ve Just Seen A Face comes on by The Beatles. That song always makes me smile.

“I’ve just seen a face. I can’t forget the time or place where we just met. She’s just the girl for me and I want all the world to see we’ve met —“ the music strums and dances in my ears.

Beautiful song lyrics dipped with amazing voices can take my mind off of the depression boggling my mind for right now. I really just need an escape. Finally I am getting off of the bus, still that pitter patter of that Oregon rain drowning my city. I walk over to the covered area at the Convention Center MAX stop so I don’t get soaked.

Not paying attention to my surroundings at all. I accidentally ran into some random ass person. I say “sorry,” not even glancing back. I don’t care. I am not actually sorry, why should I care about someone who won’t ever in my lifetime even care to know who I am. I am done caring about anyone or anything.

The MAX pulls up and takes about two years to stop and open the doors. At last, I am on my way. My way out of reality. To my surprise one of my friends is on the MAX. I take my headphones out, smile and say “Que pasa?”

My friend laughs and says “no speaky espanol.”

I laugh and reply “That’s not extremely racist at all.”

My friend’s name is Jessica. We have been friends since I was thirteen. We weren’t the closest of friends but friends nonetheless. I asked her what she was up to today. She said that she was going downtown. So we decided to hang out. Haha we were friends and she didn’t know it was my birthday, I didn’t care enough to tell her it was.

We went downtown and ran into a couple of other people. I had about fifty dollars on me and she had around forty dollars. I was still itching for that escape.

Jessica was and had always been, since I knew her, pretty heavily into dope. She called one of her dope dealers and set up a meet in Old Town ChinaTown. Ah my sweet escape was coming. I gave Jessica the money and we were on our way to Old Town. Old Town is a disgusting place, has been. Full of junkies scattered around a dirty part of this great city. It honestly made me sick to look at everyone there. Even though I am not much better I still thought I was.

We met up with her dealer, got our bag and we were off. Jessica was into shooting up. I never have been, thankfully for me Jessica had her dope pipe with her. We went to the Hilton Hotel and went into the bathroom by the swimming pool and gym. It is a walk in bathroom, so we had all the privacy we needed. She loaded about fifteen cents into her needle however she did it. I couldn’t tell, I try to avoid looking at that, it makes me really sad. I loaded around twenty cents into the pipe. I melted it down, waited for the smoke to accumulate, and took my hit to escape. Yes.

This is what I wanted.

Dope.

I felt like a real human being again. Most days I just feel like someone going through the motions. Now, now? I am me. Now I am the Timothy I wish I could be every single day. I just want another hit. So I take one and another. I take more and more. I refill the pipe. Take one last hit. Jessica and I both know we need to leave soon or the employees at the Hilton would be getting suspicious, but goddamn did I just want to camp up in there and smoke my life away. I wasn’t even thinking about this morning now.

Jessica and I were running low on our dope and we had no more money. We hatched a plan. She had this one dealer named Xavier that they weren’t really too fond of eachother. So we called him up and told him we were going to buy from him. He didn’t know that we were lying. We saw devilish schemes in our horizons. What a great sweet sixteenth. Xavier wasn’t the smartest of dealers, he didn’t pack heat, he was pretty small, he didn’t have a car, and he met with his customers by himself. Freaking i***t, he had no way to protect himself or his product. So we took advantage of it. We met him at Skidmore Fountain and trailed back behind an alley that reeked of piss and lost dreams. We beat the crap out of him and took everything he had, his money, his dope, his pride, and his livelihood. We were soulless addicts looking for our next fix. I never considered myself an addict though.

Man in that moment I felt so powerful in my world right then I was God. I was all powerful and everything was made in my image. Boy was it a beautiful image. For the first time I was seeing life and the world in technicolor. It was a vibrant world full of beautiful sounds and un selfish people. This was the Portland no one could embrace or capture in a single photo or video. No one could see this Portland until they moved and saw beyond themselves. I was invincible — even Godzilla couldn’t destroy me at this point in time.

I was on cloud nine, no one could bring me down and I was like “Josie who?” Today was my day and I was going to celebrate it. I called up some other friends and we set up a place for us to just kick it at and we all indulged in the mesmerizing monster, dope. This monster was becoming a larger and larger part of my life every hit I took.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I wake up in a cold sweat, soaking in that it was only a dream. Thank god. Everything felt so real, every smell I could smell, the taste was embedded into my taste buds. The blood of that guy I could feel on my hands. What a violent and rancid dream. Were my hands actually capable of doing something to that nature?

I decided to just shake it off even though it felt so real. I throw back my covers, get up and walk into my bathroom, a familiar and unfamiliar place at the same time. Today it is distorted. My usually immaculate bathroom is messy, toothpaste in the sink, my toothbrush not in it’s little cup, my bathtub has soap scum on it. Ew. I decide to clean this s**t before I clean myself. I walk into my kitchen and the smell of cinnamon washes over me. That’s fairly odd. I also realize no one is here. Not my mother, not Jonothan, nor my baby brother Charlie. Today is an off day I guess.

Anyways I am in the kitchen I open our faux wooden cupboards and grab our Simply Green surface cleaner. Good smelling, great at cleaning, and doesn’t completely destroy the world with its chemical base. Oh and it is actually green. I have the Simply Green, rubber gloves, and a scrubby thing. I fill the bathtub less than a quarter of the way and start scrubbing the bathtub. I finish with that sooner than I expect to, so I'm now cleaning the sink.

I decide I am lazy and that is about all the cleaning I am doing for the day. I put everything back in its place. I grab a towel and return to the bathroom, I wait for the water to be so hot the steam fogs up the mirror and I hop in. Immediately that burning hot water soothes my racing mind and sore body. I get lost within myself, drowning my thoughts with the sweet melodies of The Beatles. They always seem to know how to calm me down. I wash my hair, rinse it, condition my hair, leave it in. I really enjoy soft hair. I wash my face and scrub my body down. I rinse my face, body, and hair. Finished. Step out of the shower wrap myself in my towel and head back to my crowded room.

My full sized bed is too large for my room. Less than half of my room is left filled in with a bean bag chair, a desk, a chair to go with said desk, two little t.v. tray tables, and a bookcase filled with my livelihood, my closest friends, Poe, Shakespeare, Rice, and many more.

I look at my room with much disdain.

I grabbed some jeans, a random band t-shirt, my belt, and my Chuck Taylors. I am done with being at home, so I grab my phone off of the charger, my wallet, and I check the bus. It’s coming in five minutes, good s**t, just enough time for me to run down to the bus stop.

I run down there right as the bus pulls up. I flash my bus pass to the bus driver like I did on a daily basis. Go to the back seat on the left side of the bus right past the back doors. My normal spot. Look out the window as the cars zip past this slow ass bus. My stop finally comes within eyesight. I pull the bright yellow cable, wait for the stupid bus to actually come to a stop. I get up, push open the doors and walk to the max stop. It’s a chilly day today. Odd.. because it’s summer, the end of June actually. The end of June.. Wait it’s June 28th, it’s my birthday? A strange wave of nausea mixed with deja vu hit me. How didn’t I notice it was my birthday? I am seventeen today. It was a year ago today. That's why I had that dream that felt so real, it WAS my reality. My hands WERE capable of something so violent, I WAS capable of doing something that ferocious to another human being living on this earth.

I shake off those terrible memories haunting me. Being seventeen is just like being sixteen except the word “sweet” isn’t before it. I still can’t buy cigarettes, I still can’t vote, I guess I can register to vote but that’s nothing, minuscule in the things I would like to accomplish in my life time. Turning seventeen is dumb, not like birthdays for me have been celebrated since Josie left anyways. I haven’t had a stupid birthday cake in years, not even a little ass cupcake saying my age on it. Huh. That's kind of depressing now that I think about it.

A MAX arrives, good, I don’t want to be cold any longer. Stupid Portland, Oregon. Always cold when it should be warm and always warm when it should be cold. I walk onto the max and sit at the nearest empty seat. six stops after the Convention Center I get off and just walk around the welcoming urban jungle of Downtown Portland.

All of a sudden I feel this thick but stinging thud on the back of my head. I turn around and take a fist to my face. My fight or flight kicked in. Obviously this guy chose for me, because how could I run away from this? I punch him in the face. I ball up my fist throw it back and chuck it forward. I hit this guy square in the face. He had some friends with him who jumped in. I felt more punches to my body, I tried to fight them. There were too many of them. There was no way I was going to win this fight.

I got jumped.

I always laughed at kids who got jumped. I always thought “Well if you weren’t being a dumb f**k and doing stupid s**t then no one would want to jump you.” But no, that s**t is random. Or so I thought. I just feel my legs get kicked from under me, my head bounces off of the ground, something warm and wet is now matting my hair. I am laying there helpless getting kicked, spat on and punched in the face by, I think I count five guys? Xavier?? Haha, oh wow all along it was Xavier. I knew my sixteenth birthday was too good to be true. All that bad going on with no repercussions? What a thought. I was sure reaping all of my consequences now. I should have thought - “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.” Everything started to get dim, I think I might be losing a lot of blood now. I am as good as dead.

I am not thinking inside the realm of reality any longer. Where am I? I see a giant oak tree with forest deep green leaves, and brown aged bark in the middle of cracked cobble ground. “The Tree of Wisdom” is formed into the ground somehow. It’s there but not really there. Something faint, yet striking and commanding of power. It’s a sky of dark clouds above me, looks like rain, but the clouds hold the rain captive.

What is this place?

I see something shine in the corner of my eye. I look over. It’s a small figure smiling and waving for me to come over and follow him?

Maybe?

There is a forested area where he is, about twenty paces ahead of me. I start to run over there to this small boy, I have now determined, takes my hand and runs us into the forest. He tells me “Do not be frightened for your real family is here now.”