I am very close with my older brother. Since we are so close, I grew up with his friend's treating me as though I were their little sister as well. My brother Eddie would take me everywhere with them, to the movies, out to the mall, and sometimes just to hang out playing video games at someone's house. His six best friends, Conway, Super Steve, Malave, Keith, and North, were my replacement brothers if Eddie was ever busy. They knew everything about me and I thought I knew everything about them, but I was mistaken.
The families were close, mine and those of my brother's friends. He is particularly close with his friend Mark. He is the man that introduced my brother to my sister in law and he is the man that walked me down the aisle at their wedding wedding. I knew Mark had a sister who he was very close with but I did not suspect that he had a brother. I found out two weekends ago that Mark had a brother named Michael. I began to question why I had never met Michael, I had met Mark's family hundreds of times, why was Michael never mentioned?
I asked my brother why I had never met Michael before and he told me it wasn't his place to tell me why. My brother never leaves me hanging, so I decided to ask Michael. I asked him in polite conversation what he does with his time. He began to tell me how he was recently let out of jail for being caught with drugs. He was in jail for four years. This man must have been about 23 years old and he has already ruined his life with jail time. Do you have any idea what a person can do with four years, they can graduate from high school, receive an undergraduate degree, start a life, and so much more.
We shared a few laughs together as the night progressed but I couldn't get one question out of my head, why had he started to do heroin? I could tell he was an ex heroin addict from the tracks left on his arms, they were an awful, unnatural shade of purple that ran deep through his veins.
I drew up my courage and asked him why drugs? He then said that he had a desire to be someone else and the drugs allowed him to do so. He did not like the person he was when he looked inside the mirror before he got high but then liked what he saw when he didn't recognize himself. Society told him he needed to be a better version of himself and when he could not transform himself into that person, he decided to escape reality through the high he experienced while on heroin.
He said that if his parent's hadn't pressured him so much to make something of himself he might not have ever turned to heroin. Now though, he is clean and out of jail with a new perspective on life. Jail made him get clean and now he has ambitions to be a great writer. He plans on writing about how heroin can change a man and what drives a person to drugs in order to feed the desire to escape society and reality.
No comments:
Post a Comment