The night of thirty Xanax bars

I was twenty-four. It was the middle of October 2017, and I came home at two in the morning from a night out with the two least likely kids from my graduating class.

I sat down and asked myself a question I could not answer. How did I end up here. Not the room. The whole thing.

Then I chugged thirty Xanax bars.

I regretted it before the bottle hit the counter. That is the part nobody expects. There was no long dark night of deciding. There was a decision, and then about one second later the loudest no I have ever heard inside my own head.

So I spent the next hour doing a quarter of cocaine to keep my own heart beating. I know exactly how that sounds. It was the only lever in the room and I pulled it.

What came after was drug-induced psychosis, and it lasted longer than the night did. I fought it with anchoring — a technique I had read in a paperback at ten years old and carried for fourteen years without knowing what it was for. A kid's party trick was the only thing standing between me and the dark.

And I prayed. I told God that if He let me live through this, I would spend whatever was left on a crusade. I offered it as a trade. I have since come to think of it as an answer.

One sentence on the pills and then I will leave it alone. Bars like that get handed out like they are nothing, to people already drowning, by an industry that never has to ride in the car afterward.

I detoxed for five days at my parents' house. They took me in and there was no negotiation about it. Around the nineteenth I was 302'd, and my mother rode in the front seat the entire way there. There is a specific quiet in a car like that, and I have never found words for how loud it was.

A week in the ward. At intake they did not believe how long the drugs had been in my system — the numbers said I had used that morning, and I had not used in days.

I did not come out of there a better man. I came out a man who was still here. That week, that was the entire assignment.