woke up on a Monday morning last May.

I hadn’t slept too much that night. I’d spent the weekend in the company of my wife. On Saturday afternoon, we drove over to the nursery to pick up flowers and plants for the garden. I remember trying so hard to be careful not to knock the plants over while driving home. We took to doing our tasks – she worked on the potted plants on the back deck while I started working on the front planter. That’s when my window of opportunity opened.

This was the first time today that we’d had so much separating us – an entire house to be exact. My wife didn’t usually like leaving me alone in a different area of the house, but she was so focused on her escape of gardening that she must have forgotten for a few minutes who she was dealing with. I sent a simple text message: “You around?”. My dealer was in the neighborhood. He agreed to meet me at a local convenience store, just around the corner from my house.

I went inside, and explained to her that I wanted to get something to drink at the store. She snapped back into reality at this point and replied that that would be fine, but she’d like to go with me. This was contrary to my plans and thus my manipulator had to be summoned. I think my argument eventually was whittled down to was that “I just wanted to go alone”. My wife knew what was up and did not relent. We went back to our tasks, both silently fuming. Now I had to summon some quick thinking. I convinced my wife to let me go if I was back in less than 2 minutes. I knew I couldn’t pick up at the store because if my dealer was a fraction late, my wife would either show up looking for me, or search me when I got home. I went to the store for 2 minutes, used the ATM to withdraw cash, went home and dumped it in the mailbox. I then went to the back deck to work with my wife. This was to ensure that my wife would not see the dealer walk to the front, and exchange the cash for drugs. It also ensured that she could keep an eye on me. Coming back from the store empty handed, she would then badly for doubting me, and I would build up a bit of trust. All while still getting my fix!

I couldn’t get any needles until Sunday night – that was when I was supposed to go to an NA meeting. Instead I would go to the drug store, get my rigs and some cotton, then drive around looking for inconspicuous places to park for 2-3 minutes while I fixed and shot and then drove off again, until it was time to go home. I had a stash at home of NA pamphlets, which I would put into my sock, along with my dope, when I went upstairs to get ready to go to the meeting. I’d often show up late with various stories of meetings running late, driving people home, along with my procured NA literature to prove I’d been at the meeting.

Backtrack to Sunday afternoon. My wife was hell bent on trying to have a normal weekend. She knew that I was using but without concrete evidence, it was my manipulation and lies versus her suspicions. No matter how ridiculous my lies, without physical evidence I would clutch onto them with my cold dead hands. We took ourselves to an artisan craft fair. It was one of the first hot and humid weekends of the summer. I hadn’t snorted drugs in quite some time, but I had a big fresh bag of dope calling my name and at least a few hours before I was getting needles. I told myself I’d wait until I could get some, but I’d had a burning bag in my pocket for almost 24 hours. The single person washrooms at the craft show proved to be too much of an opening. I excused myself and found that there was a perfect little ledge for snorting cocaine built right into the wall. I remember thinking that whoever designed the area could not have foreseen how versatile this part of the architecture would be. My wife knew I was high the moment I felt high. She spent the rest of the afternoon dragging me around, silently in a huff after I stonewalled her about how high I was not. We got home and I sat on the front porch to read alone, quickly releasing bumps into my nose every 20-30 minutes, waiting until it was needle time.

Monday morning comes and as mentioned earlier, I hadn’t slept much. It was one long racing obsessive thought about using the drugs and needles that I had hidden in a shoe in my shoe rack. The only way I was going to get rid of this obsessive thought was to use drugs. Any sleep I did get was light. As usual, my wife got out of bed before I did. The routine was she would shower first, and then I would shower and then we would drive together to work (I’d drop her off at her place of employment and then drive to work). By this time I had been awake for awhile. I was very uncomfortable as the physical anxieties of these racing using thoughts began to wear on me. I decided that in about 30 minutes, when her alarm sounded and she crawled into the shower, I would seize the day. Once I heard her get in the shower I sprang into action, and cooked up a shot on her dresser top, where she couldn’t see. Of course, in my addict-driven clamor, I was not nearly as agile as I thought. She heard me and came rushing out of the shower. I didn’t have time to do anything. There it was, the physical evidence that she’d been both dreading and craving.

Many expletives and tears were thrown my way, boiling down to essentially “Get out of the house, get some help and don’t talk to me until you sort your shit out”.