By Shogua Waziri

Friends of Guest House, June 8, 2022

It all started the moment I turned 18. Well not that exact moment but you get the gist of things. I grew up with amazing parents who never skipped a beat. They were active in me and my brother’s life’s, making us a family that was close.

I redid the whole dynamic of my family the day I started using. I took 18 years of the same routine and natural life and turned it upside down and inside out. I stole somebody’s daughter, and someone’s sister the moment I started IV’ing my arms, I stole her and didn’t give her back to her family for the next 7 years.

For the next 7 years that family was going to loose their precious little daughter and their older sister to the disease of addiction. She was going to be alive but at the same time her presence would thin out in their life’s, her life wasn’t about anyone but herself and her disease for the next 7 years.

Her brothers didn’t have anything to do with her, they gave up, I mean how many times will you believe someone who comes home once in a blue moon and breaks down crying to you that they will never do what they have done, only to walk out the front door that very night again?

My disease not only robbed them out of their daughter but it robbed me from me. I was replaced with this human being that I thought I would never be, I was foreign to the body and mind I was living in.

I had nothing to show for the past 7 years of my life besides a lengthy record which marched me right out of several jobs.

I had nothing to show for the past 7 years besides some track marks and tattoos.

I had nothing and yet the drugs I was partaking in made me feel like I had everything. The drugs made me think I was whole and happy when I had them, but oh were the drugs taunting and screaming at me when I didn’t have them yearning for my arms or my nose or lips to take them in, so they could make a home inside of me.

The drugs had taken me out of my home so they could make their home inside of me.