Kissing Brittany Murphy

Everyone thinks the life of a drug addict is so exciting and eventful, like how it’s portrayed in drug movies. You picture us running through the streets, stealing from cars and old ladies, drug cartels and gun shots, you picture us with other people and other addicts like us. Our lives are nothing like those of the junkies in Hollywood-- it’s far more pathetic. I’ll still be an addict when that two hour movie, begins rolling credits.

Here’s reality; Every day is spent figuring out how to get your hands on $40, finding drugs, doing drugs, hiding drugs, finding places to do drugs, being high, being too high, not being high enough, coming down, going up, hating drugs, loving drugs, hating yourself, being too high to hate anything, making friends, losing friends, dead friends, having no friends, getting sober, relapsing and then finding $40 again. It appears exciting in the beginning but eventually it’s just a repetitive routine you can’t escape and more often than not, you end up cycling alone and wondering where all your friends are, why they left without you.

Junkie bonds never last very long and they’re just as unreliable as the drugs they revolve around, you can’t love someone else when you can’t even love yourself. Every now and then we’ll try, we’ll try to fall in love or create substantial connections with another human being but inevitably it falls apart just like Candy and Dan. Whether subconscious or otherwise; we love the drugs more, we love euphoria and it’s a love so incredibly powerful that sometimes we forget about everything we loved before. But Hollywood gives us hope that one day we’ll meet someone so incredible that drugs can’t compare, like an angel sent to bring us to sobriety. There won’t ever be an angel, you can only count on yourself.

Hollywood portrays drug addicts as guiltless people without the ability to feel empathy or consequence, we’re bulldozers destroying everything in our path. It’s quite the opposite actually, I feel guilty all the time. I feel guilty when I realize my little brother’s birthday was today but I never called, when it’s my mothers graduation dinner and I’m showing up hours late because I’d been waiting in a parking lot for three hours. The guilt is heavy when I look my best friend in the eye and promise her I’ll stop getting high, only to pick up a syringe before the end of the night. Sometimes I think it would be easier if we never feel guilty about the horrible things we did because then it would make more sense when we did it ten more times and then five more after that. But we do feel guilty, we do know the hurt we’re causing but we can’t stop.. I can’t stop.

Don’t you wish our lives could be like our favorite drug movies? That we could have our happy ending, maybe we’d get clean or get a goodbye kiss from a woman as beautiful as Brittany Murphy and the nightmare’s over when credits start rolling. Think about it.. after two hours we’d be able to live our own lives and we could finally stop cycling. If this was a perfect world, my life would be a drug movie and I’d end up happy like the Hollywood junkies. Only, nothing can ever be perfect and I still need that $40.