I KILLED CHARLIE
I love cocaine and wine. Actually, let me happily rephrase that. I loved cocaine and wine.
Charlie and Rouge were my best of friends a for quite a while. The dynamic duo were there to increase my confidence, heighten my creativity, add muscle mass to my power and solidify my essence of being.
They made me feel wanted, adored, adorned and intellectually unchallenged. They listened when no one else would and never spoke back to me with words to dissuade. To quote the famous Daft Punk song, when I was with Charlie and Rouge, I felt ‘harder, better, faster, stronger’.
Charlie had many names. A Gee, Bump, Blow, Beak, Coke, C, Dust, Flake, Line, Marching Powder, Nose Candy, Rock, Snow, Snow White, Sniff or Toot. Any name he went by, I knew it was him when he called my name. He usually called when he knew Rouge and I were having a good time.
The relationship with Charlie, in particular, was abusive. He’d be with me all night. However, when I didn’t want him to leave, when I was sat there, trembling and unable to go to sleep, when I needed him to give me one last embrace, he was gone, leaving me high and dry, with the feeling of his numbing residue.
He brought me up, but always left me in misery and all-consuming solitude just as I came spiralling back down to Earth. Still, despite all of this, I let him back in to play his mind-altering games with my fragile brain.
Charlie didn’t bite my finger, but he did gnaw away at my ever-dwindling budget. He never paid for anything leaving my bank balance in dire straits. He also romanced me while whispering sweet nothings into my ear telling me to lie to my friends, my family and myself. Eventually, there were strict orders to keep our relationship a secret. A special relationship, just between him and I.
He loomed over me, watching intently, as I entered into a world of debilitating, darkness and paranoia. His solution; to offer me his cold shoulder to cry on. I desperately accepted the offer, but things became increasingly worse. It would never be the same as the first time we met. That initial feeling of excitement and giddiness in his presence had dissipated. Rouge was always on hand to help black it all out. I felt like the word invisible.
As much as I tried to revisit how we were before, as much as I tried to revisit and reignite the spark; Charlie was fast becoming increasingly dangerous and unpredictably unreliable. It wasn’t working anymore. We weren’t working anymore.
He robbed me of my nights and butchered my days. I lashed out in haste as he left me to waste.
Like a Shakespearean tragedy, our Romeo and Juliet style love affair were doomed to failure. The ending would need one of us to die.
So, I killed Charlie, took a metaphorical slash at Rouge’s jugular and spilt her claret.
Now, the difference between this story and William’s is that the protagonist, (yours truly), is so much happier without them.
My struggle to successfully stay sober (today), has come with its peaks and troughs. After trying and giving up, (using a multitude of different, unorthodox methods), I was lucky enough to find my ‘red pill’. The ‘pill’ that unplugged me from the Matrix of drug and alcohol dependency. My ‘red pill’ was writing.
It sounds so simple I know, but it’s taken me 3 years (since my efforts began) to find my solution to remain sober every day, so evidently, it wasn’t that simple for me!
I liked drinking wine and taking coke, until I despised it, (and then myself) with every fibre of my being.
Towards the end, what had been a social buzz, turned into lonely, tortured artistry, as I dwindled in mind and body, convincing myself that the substances opened me to my truth and allowed me to create and write in my most raw form. Bullshit.
My bookshelves are dotted with Moleskins (ordered every week, when I was wasted), as my intentions were always to ‘start afresh’. Every one of them contain the ramblings of a pissed up mad woman. Poem and verse about the ‘Meaning of Life’, ‘How to be Seen in the Darkness’, ‘The Void of Humanity’, blah blah blah.
Now, when I look at the smooth exteriors of those books, I daren’t open the pages as every single stroke of ink, contains its own rough, explicit, imaginatively crafted, seventh circle of insidious hell.
The babbling, bumbling, brain farts of a weary, warped and wired mind.
The chemical highs and the liquid lows told me I could write better with them as opposed to without. They were supposed to expand my mind and take me to the place of art, the place where Johnny Cash wrote from. If they’d had their way, I would be with Johnny Cash right now and no one would be reading my sanity.
I started writing to stay sober as I believe, it’s my right to be sober. It makes me feel like the word invincible.
The things I’ve learnt and absorbed whilst writing have astounded me. They’ve also helped me understand and educate myself about my personal addictions.
I now recognise and appreciate the phrase, ‘with knowledge comes power’ and subsequently, since I made the decision to dedicate as much of my time and energy to my bliss, life is slowly becoming sweeter and more rewarding.
I started writing a book about my journey to sobriety; however, it’s bloody boring! I’m sober and have a lot more to say and finer things to celebrate.
Writing about my past in harrowing, explicit detail in an attempt to understand my ‘why’ was becoming an all-consuming, catalytic experience. It’s much more fun looking to the future and writing in my accustomed, sometimes comedic style. Revisiting the past with a lightness of heart in order to preserve my present and presence.
Over the last few months, my pen has started to scrawl more tales of joy as opposed to sorrow. I’m taking what happened yesterday and fuelling my tomorrow. There’s more positivity in my marrow. I feel like Apollo.
“We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to.”
― W. Somerset Maugham
