What they don’t tell you about celebrating your sobriety date is that it has a strange tendency to coincide with the anniversary of the worst thing that’s ever happened to you.

There is a me from before it happened and a me from after.

And when I look at her I feel a tremendous sense of guilt.

Because I didn’t save her.

I couldn’t save her.

She needed me and I wasn’t there.

In every other universe, I died that day.

In every other universe, my father came home from work 5 minutes later and five minutes later was too late.

In every other universe, my father came home to a corpse.

By most accounts, I shouldn’t be alive today.

By the rest, it’s a miracle that I’m alive today.

And sometimes, when I tell people about this, they ask what I’m doing with my second chance at life.

And that’s just about the cruelest question I can imagine asking someone who was nearly killed in their pursuit of a memoir-worthy life.

I can't believe I let myself get old and fat. I can feel my value in the sexual marketplace plummeting with every year older I get.

And people tell me it's a good thing to no longer attract predatory men but what they don't seem to understand is that that's fucking all of them.

They all want to fuck teenagers.

And my desirability to older, richer, more powerful men felt like a lifeline.

It doesn't really matter that I'm only 21 and only a size 4. I have grown in more ways than one. I am heavier now in more ways than one.

And I will never get my youth back because I traded it away in exchange for inconsequential men pretending to listen to me. Pretending to see me as more than a fleshlight.

But my older, fatter body is proof that I survived. That I learned how to grocery shop and cook. That I choose the anti-depressants that worked over the ones that killed my appetite.

And maybe that isn't any better, maybe it just is.

You can tell that you’re losing him and find yourself wondering why.

Not because you can’t think of a reason but because you can think of too many.

Is it because you were too needy? Too selfish? Too inconvenient? Is it because he’s too busy?

You conclude that it’s probably because you broke up with him six months ago.

one day you're 16, panicking because the other kids at school are sending around a video of you passed out drunk on the floor at a party a few weeks earlier

then you're 17, snorting cocaine with the hundred bill your grandma gave for christmas

then you're 18, posting porn you've titled something like "tiny blonde teen tries anal"

then you're 19, fucking your boss, happy because he's the first man to treat you like a person

then you're 20, writing a LinkedIn blog about some advancement in digital marketing that you don't really understand

you're 20, celebrating three years sober

you're 20, crying while unloading the dishwasher in your new apartment at midnight

you're 20, and people are still telling you to enjoy your youth

you're 20, and you don't know what they mean

you're 20, and your youth was never yours, just something for men to commodify

you're 20, and your youth never felt like something to enjoy, just a string of horrible things, most of them self-inflicted

you're 20, and everything is ok now but you're still not

It’s strange, really.

You spend your teenage years thinking you’ll be face down, dead in a ditch before you get the right to vote.

And then one day, you wake up and you’re 20.

You’ve got most of a college education, job offers on the table, and a good friend or two.

You realize that you’re boring now and that you’re probably going to turn out ok.

Your life probably won’t turn out as incredible as you imagined as a child or as tragic as you expected when you were 17.

Time moves much faster and nothing of real consequence happens anymore.

Your life is no longer littered with overdoses and psych ward stints.

Back then, you were falling apart while the world carried on without you.

But now, the world is falling down around you while you carry on making coffee and dodging rubble on your way to work.

you hope that someday it will hurt enough to make you up and change your whole life but it doesn't work like that.

the banal drudgery eats away at you bit by bit until any energy you have left becomes a precious commodity that must be reserved for tasks like frying an egg or brushing your teeth.

it's then that you whisper to yourself "I cannot leave my parents a corpse" over and over again until it echos in your head.

My best client right now is a young, attractive, coked-out, wall street millionaire who pays a dollar per message for the dubious luxury of speaking to me.

It's funny, or maybe sad, but his life looks exactly like what I dreamed of when I was sixteen years old.

I don't know for certain which one of us is most unhappy but I have the creeping suspicion that it's him.

He's still racing against the clock, gambling that the expensive drugs and meaningless sex can prop him up, just for long enough to make his millions. It's not a race that can be won.

I know he'd fly me out to New York and I could live out my debaucherous teenage fantasies in brilliant technicolor but I already know the glorious freedom of losing that race.

I used to be so jealous of people for whom the drugs kept working but, I'm not anymore.

No addict gets sober before their world falls down around them, and in AA they say "I wish you all the pain necessary".

I went through hell, hard and fast and young, it looked like self-destruction, overdoses, and suicide attempts but, it was a blessing.

I'm the lucky one.

All the worst moments of my life run through my head

Like scenes from a Tarantino flick

Detached, impersonal, shocking but, entertaining

This one is no different

Moments of consciousness come and go

When I strain against the fog

Of fentanyl and propofol

I find myself in a hospital bed

I’m gasping for air

And with every breath

A deep pain envelopes my chest

Both from my bleeding lungs and bruised ribs

Ribs bruised by my Father’s hands

Not in violence

But, in a desperate attempt to resuscitate the daughter

that he found blue and unconscious, lying on her bedroom floor

On the first day that I begin to come to

In the intensive care unit

I must’ve asked a dozen nurses, a dozen times each

What had happened to me

Most nurses say that they don’t know

That my lungs are just very sick

A few tell me that I overdosed

They ask if I was trying to kill myself

It’s a reasonable question

This isn’t my first time in this hospital

In fact, it’s my third time so far this year

It is, however, my first time outside the psych ward

I can’t answer the question

I don’t know

I don’t remember taking any drugs

I don’t even remember who I am

My nurses explain patiently

That I’ve been in a coma for the past week

I don’t believe them until I look at my fingernails

They’re longer than they’ve ever been before

I’ve never been so miserable as in those first few days

After I woke up in the hospital

My mind isn’t working

And neither is my body

I can’t think

Or eat, or walk, or breathe

Or speak above a raspy whisper

I’m barely a person anymore

I beg the nurses to restart the propofol drip

To let me slip back into the

Omnipresent nothingness of a coma

They refuse

The nurses tell me that I’ll make a full recovery

I just have to fight

Fight for what?

I can’t remember any life before this

When my begging for sedation goes unmet

I will myself to die

I tell the nurses that I don’t want to live

If living is like this

They call for a psychiatrist

He’s a condescending, pretentious man

Who does a poor job of feigning sympathy

He asks me why I would say something so morbid

I tell him that he’d want to die to

If he woke up in a hospital bed

With no memory

And a completely non-functioning body

I don’t want to fight

I don’t care if I survive

I don’t have any option

But to lay in my bed and keep breathing

So that’s what I do

I fight, not because I’m afraid to lose my life

But because I have absolutely nothing else to do

They’re not going to let me die

I learn days later

Why they thought I tried to kill myself

The boy who’d given me the pills told my father

that I must’ve made an attempt because he’d rejected me

I didn’t remember enough to say for certain that he was wrong

But the feeling in the pit of my stomach

Told me that he was trying to absolve himself of guilt

For giving me laced pills and leaving me for dead

After I learned that he had said such a thing

I refused to die

I fought for my life

With all the fury of a woman scorned

The entanglement of my income, sexuality, and personhood is weighing heavily on me tonight. I feel like I’m constantly betraying myself, abusing myself, mistreating myself. Every time I go to bed with a man I know shouldn’t, it’s a betrayal. I give far too much of myself to men who can’t or won’t truly care for me. I want sex to be simple, mechanical, just two people enjoying the pleasures granted to us by our bodies but it isn’t. The reason it isn’t is because I don’t have sex for the pleasure of it alone, I have sex to try to soothe the ever-present hunger in my soul. I give my body to men in the hopes that they’ll be able to make me feel valuable, desirable but too often I just feel like a piece of meat, either while I’m still in their arms or when I’m leaving their apartment alone. I use sex, in the same way, I used drugs, in a desperate attempt to alleviate the hurt, sometimes it works for a bit, sometimes it doesn’t but every time I eventually come out worse for wear. Maybe I give my body to men that I know will hurt me because I think I deserve it, maybe I do it because I think things will be different this time around. All of my attachments are unhealthy by design because at least that way the pain doesn’t come as a surprise.

my anxieties feel much like an old radiator

that hums, gently, constantly

in the background of my life

only to begin it's banging and shrieking

at seemingly random

and always inopportune times