"I'm Without" - Withdrawals From Ice

So, my connections hit a temporary "drought" of sorts, due to a huge bust that had been making its way into Alabama from Texas. We'd be down for about a week and a half, probably, they had said.

There was no ice to be found anywhere, and the gnawing in the pit of my stomach spelled out a fear that, for me, was every bit as frightful as the fear some people experience when faced with losing everything they own or even when first hearing that our nation is going to war.

Withdrawals were coming. I could taste them, smell them, and dread them in a way one dreads entering a courtroom in order to be sentenced after a guilty verdict. I didn’t want to go through it. I didn’t want to stop using.

The routine had become second nature to me. I was definitely a meth junkie, and though shameful of the fact many times, escaping into that little glass bowl at the end of my pipe wiped away all the guilt and anxiety of neglected parenthood.

But this time it wouldn’t matter how hard I searched. Everyone was out. A strange and complete drought had come to Alabama, and I had never been one who was able to “put back for a rainy day.” Oh, I had tried to before, just for times like this, but I always ended up smoking it, wanting to be higher, wanting more and more until finally I ruined relationships further due to meth psychosis and having been up way too many days without sleep.

The meth I had just ran out of was very strong, and it carried me throughout the night and into the next morning while I picked through the carpet in the floor of the room I had smoked in, searching for just another crumb, another decently sized shard of crystallized peace. The cravings for more had set in hard. If I didn’t crash soon, I would find myself hysterically crying and cursing, throwing a fit that could not be justifiably termed "emotional breakdown."

I searched for a pill, anything to placate the gnawing fear of being without. It’s so incredibly unbearable. I wanted to be knocked out, but my body was not tired yet. And there was a faint hope that someone somewhere would find some more for me to buy or deal out in order to have some of my own. I remained in this state for about half a day. Then I dropped.

When crashing after a four or five day stretch with no sleep, it’s as if I am in a coma. Nothing really wakes me at all. If I am aroused, it is only to a slightly coherent state where nothing makes sense to me. “Mama, the house is on fire,” would be answered with “Okay, sweetie, but not for too long because you have homework to finish.” That deep crashing sleep lasts, for me, about 12 to 15 hours.

After that, there is a period of normal sleep, lasting about 2 to 5 days. I can wake normally, eat, understand things during that 2 to 4 day sleep time, but I am so drained and drowsy that I want to do nothing more than sleep. And of course, faced with the knowledge that I have no dope, sleep is preferred to being awake.

About the fourth or fifth day without crystal meth, I abruptly awake in the middle of the night, my kidneys burning, perhaps because I am dehydrated, perhaps because I have laid on them for five days without getting up and moving around much. My spine is tingling with an uncomfortable twisting sensation and every hair on my body is standing on end. I just want to go back to sleep, but cannot. I’m awake. And nothing helps.
I need a sleep aid. I search the house for something, anything, and come up with a nighttime allergy medication that helps induce sleep. I take as many as I can find, about 6 or 7, and wait for the blissful waves of sleep to engulf me and save me from the twisting grip something has on my spine.

Cold sweats grip down into my bones, it seems, and I try not to think about anything because the anxiety and outright fear creates monsters of problems within my worrying mind out of anything I dwell upon for very long. Faces of people who love me and want me to love them again flood my mind and before I drift off to sleep to be free from this wave of withdrawals, I cry hard and long for my children.

I think about how they must feel. I think about the time I have wasted, the looks on their faces when they want me to spend time with them but I am too busy looking for my next high. After the long cry, I am off to dream about the same things, though now they are horribly twisted into unreal pictures in my dream world, pictures of my daughters drowning and me not being able to save them.
I have always believed in God. I have known Him from the very earliest memories I have in life. I have known Him in a personal, friendly, Fatherly way for as long as I can remember. And His enemy knows this. His enemy loves to plague me with things, and I suppose I make it easy for him to, considering the ways I choose to live my life.

So, interspersed with the “my kids are dying and I sit helpless” dreams, come the occasional “there’s something evil in the room it must be Satan he is here growling and holding you down” dreams.
About five hours into the allergy medication induced sleep, the dreams have made me wake up fully, and I cannot get back to sleep. Kidneys burning, no position comfortable, spine screaming and twisting, mind racing. Just a few more days, I pray. Just a few more.
What then - the depression? Will the cravings end? How long will this go on? I know enough about withdrawals to know that some doctors mark the length of post acute methamphetamine withdrawal for up to two years. Did I dream that? No, it is so, as crazy as it sounds.
My God, why did I ever start this horrible, frightfully terrible relationship with crystal meth? I would smoke more right now, even in the middle of this epiphany! But what on earth could I have been thinking with that first taste of hell?
I start to blame everyone from the President on down to the mayor of our little town for allowing such a horrible epidemic to find its way to our country. Still, I know I am the one to blame for having tried it. I know it is my fault that I am in the uncomfortable, strange, frightening, sad, hopeless, sick position I am in.

And I know it is going to get worse. I know that very soon, I will feel displaced, out of my own skin, and fully awake to enjoy every hideous moment.
And if the person who had originally handed me the straw to snort a try of it years and years ago could have instead shown me this day, I would have ran away screaming “No!" And I would have never searched for an escape from the beautifully welcoming small problems I once believed I could not handle sober.