Psychosis

Poppy Seeds

It was around noon on July 2, 2020, when I walked back in the door of the house. I crawled into bed next to Damien to say good morning and give him a kiss. He snuggled against me and grinned wide, the warmth from his skin helped me relax, as did the warmth from the shower. I laid in the tub and let the grime wash off of me and at some point fell asleep.

When I opened my eyes, the water had been shut off, clean clothes had been set on the counter, and a towel had been laid over me. I cracked a sleepy grin and got dressed. After I’d walked out of the bathroom with my dirty clothes, I realized the drugs that were in my pocket were gone. Something didn’t feel right. The house was empty, Damien was gone.

I went searching for him throughout the house nonchalantly and tried several times to reach out by phone. He forwarded all of my calls and refused to answer my texts, eventually, he sent a voice clip.

“Mind your f*****g business and stop texting me. I don’t have time for you.”

Excuse me, sir, what the f**k?

That isn’t right.

What are you talking about? That’s obviously his voice.

He sounds different.

Have you ever actually seen him on drugs?

I paused. My shade was right. I’d met a lot of people on drugs but I’d never seen it do something like that. Once again I pulled my boots on and by the time the sun had set, I had left in search of my partner. My first stop was Lawrence’s house. I found him in his shed, drawing nude women and rolling a bowl. We smoked and chatted about where I might find someone who fell off the face of the Earth to chase a dragon down a rabbit hole.

I showed him a picture and he showed the picture to a few other people over text, no one knew where he’d be, but due to that, it narrowed down the possible trap houses I could locate him to. I reached out to some friends of his and one of them told me he had given him a ride earlier that day to a trailer park on County Road 49.

Upon mentioning this information to Lawrence, he told me I should hurry. The Stallion roared to life and I drove off, turning from Peachtree to Cedar, from Cedar to Underwood, and from Underwood to 65, 65 to 12, 12 to 49. About a mile down on the left was a trailer park; I parked at the only disheveled house, and with a picture of him from the day we got engaged, I approached the door.

A bit shaken and exhausted from the night before, my knuckles shakily rapped on the aluminum door. A short, thin man opened it.

“Can I help you?”

“I’m looking for my husband.” I handed over the photo.

“We saw him earlier,” he scratched his bald head, “but he ain’t here now.” The photo found its way back into my hand. My heart sank and at the same time, I felt a heavy weight lift from my chest. “Darlin’, you don’t look so good, why don’t you come in and relax, and maybe we can help you find your man.”

The time on my phone read 8:32 when I entered the home. It was very surreal at first, it reminded me of one of those terrible old movies when a trenchcoat looking for a lost lover would make his way through a back alley nightclub, into the private room where you would find people who no longer lived in the conscious realm.

As if the trenchcoat, dressed in all black, brooding as a raven would, seemed to be the only person maintaining their sanity. I took my seat upon an old couch that sank down beneath my weight. In the room were two other men and two teenage boys, all of which were high. Although, not the kind of high I was accustomed to being exposed to. Something was different, there was an air about the place and I could hear my shade in the depths of my mind. Or perhaps, it was my intuition.

You have to find it.

I began feeling like a private investigator and it wasn’t a feeling of pleasure. The gentleman who had opened the door and I had exchanged a conversation as to what had happened earlier in the day when I had awoken to find Damien missing.

The man said things to me that only my shade would say. He even said things to me that caused my shade discomfort. Things in the nature of Damien not really loving me, for if he had cared at all in any capacity, drugs would be the last thing on his mind.

The ultimate reason this resonated with me in such a negative way was not so much that he had gone missing and left me for drugs but more or less the idea that I had been doing this for so long.

How many days did I miss out? How many moments had passed me by? How many meals and how many snuggles and how many movies? How many mornings, how many books, how many kisses goodnight? How many moments had I sacrificed with my family, for a world that was only interested in taking me out?

We talked for a while and nearing midnight, the gentleman and I went out searching possible locations for my missing love.

2:00 AM had rolled around and I still had no leads. I decided that I would go back to Lawrence’s house and see if anyone had seen or heard anything. Unfortunately, that too was a dead end. I returned to the trap house on County Road 49 and when I had entered, I ran into a girl that I had met once before at the home of another big fish in our little pond.

She recognized me but did not know who I was. I thought it was absurd that she couldn’t remember me. We’d only met a month or so before.

I hung out, and chatted, waiting for something interesting to happen; when around 3:30 to 4:00 o’clock, I asked if anyone had anything to help me stay awake. The gentleman brought me into the master bedroom of the house. It was an eerie room. I sat at a table across from an intimidating man who I assumed was the leaseholder of the home. Above him was a blacklight and on the wall was a rack of ball caps, much like you’d find in the room of a middle school athlete raised in a blue-collar family.

The gentleman relayed to the man at the table that he needed a quarter gram of meth. The man weighed out a small rock at 0.05 and a larger rock at 0.2. These crystals were not crystals. They were soft and chalky. I was skeptical and had absolute skivvies. The feeling that there was something I had to see as if I was playing a dangerous game of seek-and-find, would not leave me.

And that’s when I heard it. A man to my left had come into the room and giggled, smacking his friend on the shoulder. He asked, “Do you think Heather would be pissed if I woke her up?”

Simultaneously his friend and I looked to the bed where a thin blonde girl half laid stretched out on the edge of an unsheeted mattress. Unconscious, a needle sticking from her arm.

The friend chuckled and shook his head, “Dude, I don’t think Heather is even going to wake up.”

Every inch of my nervous system came alive, my fight or flight kicked in and I began seeing what looked like zombies, appearing, disappearing, and reappearing, from the crevices within the walls of the building. As I passed back through the room, to my right was a bathroom and within it, two women. One sat on the edge of the tub while a man held her needle steady, another passed out on the floor between the tub and the counter.

Filthy needles with black contents were spread throughout the master bedroom and for some reason, I still hadn’t grasped what I was witnessing. Perhaps I was exhausted from being up, perhaps I was too focused on finding Damien, perhaps I didn’t want to recognize what was right in front of me.

I stood at the counter right around daybreak on July 3, 2020. The gentleman and I had laughed and joked and had a good little time hanging out, I think we likely could have been friends had things not gone in the way that they did. I laid out my line and by that point in life, I had done a multitude of drugs.

Point two-five grams was nothing.

I thought to myself that it wasn’t what I was told it was, but the drip would take longer to hit me than it would take me to leave. Unfortunately, I was very wrong. Not all of my decisions were good ones. I crushed up the larger rock and laid it out in a thick line measuring nearly a foot long. The entire line was whisked away, into my sinus cavity.

Almost immediately, an unfamiliar flavor, an unfamiliar texture, and an unfamiliar drain hit me at once. I began to panic, looking out the window, I paused and spoke. “Well damn the sun is up and I have to work soon.”

He walked me to my car and tried to hold a conversation. I drove away, never looking back.