vi.

dark

The withdrawal symptoms start just two days after I move back home on house arrest.

It's not just a headache anymore, either. It's now a lot of shaking, chattering teeth, and terrible aches in my stomach. It's long, insomniac nights where I lie in sweat-soaked sheets and cry because everything inside me hurts. It can be eighty degrees in the house, and the surface of my skin will still feel like my veins are packed with snow.

Apparently, going cold-turkey on cocaine is a bitch. For a few days straight, the idea of food repulses me and sleep is impossible.

My mom's at work most of the time – picking up extra hours as a diner waitress – so she doesn't see how bad it gets. I also lock myself in my room practically at all times when she's home. I like to avoid the constant look in her eyes at all costs: a kind of deep-seated disappointment that will probably never fade. She tiptoes around me, too, like she worries she might say or do something that will set me off. I can't stand it.

Maybe it would be better if I actually talked with her. But there's a defiant edge in me that refuses to give her that "mother-daughter" vibe, let alone a friendly relationship. So I mostly create stiff silences and awkward glances.

I don't hate her. I really don't.

I guess it started when I finished high school. My mom wanted me to keep going to school, at a cheap community college just a town over. "You have so much potential. You just gotta try," she insisted, but it was all bullshit to me. More school was the last thing I wanted.

It wasn't that I didn't like taking classes – not that I'll ever admit that. It was because I just wasn't good at it. I'm still not, probably. I'm not really good at anything.

See, there's not much to do besides think when you're on house arrest. Doing anything else is practically impossible.

I want to take a walk just to clear my head? Can't. Want to pick up some groceries from the store down the street? Can't. Want to walk down the driveway just to get the fucking mail? Can't.

Once the shakes and the freezing skin are finally over, I'm at a loss for what to do. So I sit inside all day and think.

And all this thinking has only made me feel empty inside.

It's not the fact that I got myself in trouble. It's not that I got myself mixed up with the wrong people, or that I started doing drugs – because all drugs are bad, and if you do drugs you'll die, right, kids? – no, it's not any of that.

It's that I started to wonder; like, fuck. What am I good for?

What have I got that can help anyone? What have I got that can make a mom or a friend say, "Yeah, Kira's really got a knack for...", or something like, "Kira's fucking brilliant at..."

Oh, that's right. Kira's not good at anything.

Except sex.

Daughter of the year, everyone.

I'm trying to make a joke out of it. But none of it's really that funny to me, because if I actually lay down and think – which is all I do now, most days – I find that I can't think of a single thing I'm good at other than sex. I was never exceptional at anything in school. I can't cook, and God forbid I ever try to clean anything.

There's nothing else I can do.

Two nights ago, I cried. I think my mom was dead asleep at the time, so she wouldn't have heard a thing. But I still buried my face against the pillow and bit into the sheets, holding back the sobs from breaking out into the quiet night air. I clamped down on it all and let myself cry in silence. Alone, like always.

I fell apart because I couldn't ignore it anymore. If the only thing I'm good for is sex, then what am I supposed to do?

That's easy, of course. Start doing it for money.

And it's that idea which scares me more than anything.