Chapter Twenty-Four
Tru
The dark wraps around me as I fall. I could hear voices before and now it’s nothing at all. I can’t explain it, but before I am sure I heard him my very own James Dean. Talking to me, calling me, begging me not to go. To wake up to tell him something. I can’t remember.
The sound of the music pulls at me as the hushed tones of voices dance inside my head. I pretend not to notice. All I wanted and have wanted for months now is to drown it all out. The numbing effects of the drugs helped me replace the endless pain in my head, the horrible memories that made me feel sick. The knowledge that I was heading down the same path as I took years prior to him. I know I had sworn to myself I wouldn’t do it but look here we are.
Desperation.
The same ugly, bad, broken desperation that looked back at me every time I looked in the mirror or sat down and looked at my phone. I’d catch myself at work in a window or a fridge door. He broke me. They broke me, and I allowed it. I fell and now look I’m slipping farther away.
“Jay, help me,” I try to whisper, my tongue heavy in my mouth, my lips not wanting to work. I struggled to make anything move. Why can’t I move. Why is my body like concrete? My head is screaming as my eyes try to open and my arms feel like lead. “What did you take?” I hear them, him, my James Dean and voices I don’t know scream at me. Why are they all yelling at me? Why do they sound like monster’s coming for me? I try to run further and deeper.
“Miss Monroe, what did you fucking take?” That is odd, no-one knows my last name. Who is this person? I started screaming but no sound came out. Where is Jayden? I heard him before all this moving started and now, now I just don’t know. The blinding white light burns under my eye lids as I struggle to lift them open.
The only thing I could do was scream in silence, where the only person who could hear me speaking out and screaming was sitting in my head on her throne, fucking laughing and laughing. She was tapping her nails on the arm of her throne like the crazy ass queen. It used to be it was the old me, sitting there, laughing at me, mocking me, taunting me, making me fall down the same rabbit hole. Going deeper down, so far that I was getting whiplash from the speed.
So far down I had fallen again after I had fought to stay up on this side of sober. “I don’t want to fall,” I whispered. “Don’t let me fall. I don’t want to go. Please, I don’t want to go down. Not this way, not again. Please let me go, let me fucking go. I don’t want to be like the old you, not now. Now I have found him. He’s like a little color inside the grey even though we are fighting. He’s what I want. I want to live. I want to smile, to feel, to kiss him again. I want to fucking survive!” But that’s not what came out of my mouth. All that I heard was my own manic laughter. Loud, crazy, drugged-up laughter, and I realized that it was the evil in me, the part of me that is so disgusted about her actions and old ways that she is getting off on this. It’s like she’s tongue kissing death and fucking the devil to keep me this side of the fucked-up, drugged illusion that is TruMonroe. “I need help.
Help me, help me please. Don’t let this happen, don’t let me go, don’t let this happen to me, save me, get me away from me, can’t you see? She’s evil, she’s dragging me down, she wants me to suffer. She wants this to happen to me so she can win and keep me locked inside hell’s gates.” Why can’t they hear me? Why can’t they see inside my head, see what is going on. The room is so quiet now, then I feel a weight beside me, a warmth covering my skin. I am begging my limbs to move, for my eyes to open. Whomever it is with me was crying now. Little sad tears fall down their cheeks and onto my skin. I feel the warm drops drying to a sweet chill. Their arms pulled me against them, held me tight. “I need you to listen, baby, I need you to fight to come back to me. I don’t know what is going on. I don’t know much at all. I know that I love you and together we can try and make this fucked-up thing we call love work,” he whispered in my ear as I lay there fucking trapped, cursed by the evil queen who’s still laughing as she files her nails. “You’re so beautiful, baby, it fucking hurts.” His sweet voice finds my senses and I beg my body to respond to him and his words.
I fell down the rabbit hole. Someone pushed me; he pushed me, they pushed me, and pulled me down. I fell, fell off the wagon in Stella fashion. In that moment as exhaustion washed over my already tired broken body I decided to hide in a corner. The corner I knew so well. In the back of my mind, in the tiny dark alley that no one knew about. Where I could mourn, where I could be the fucking broken little mess the drug loving queen had made me into. I hid there, and I pulled the darkness around me like a blanket of nightmares. I stayed there vowing to keep my mind in that fucked-up little corner where I could scream as much as I wanted to. And no one could hear it. They couldn’t see how much I had fucked up. No grandad he wasn’t inside this part. No James Dean because the sound of his broken voice and shattered soul did more damage than any amount of drugs could ever do to my body.
***
Jayden
It was late, and I couldn’t sleep. I’d been awake all night traveling and then all day. Now it was night again. I am too shaken up by the events of the day to let myself have some rest. I have watched her be shocked back to life over and over. I have slipped in next to her and I have tried to pull her back to me with words and touch alone. She’s so far down the rabbit hole that not even I can reach her now. She has to fight her way out all on her own. I will stay every step of the way. I will talk and I will fight for her, with her, against her.
Mike is on his way and so is Bella. I didn’t know who else to call. My mother maybe but fuck, it’s not a good idea for a God loving woman to help me detox my love while she fights to stay sober. I know the only woman that could even handle that is Bella. Tru has no-one other than her best friend who’s currently in rehab. Ringing him was hard. He cried and cried and screamed then laughed and said lucky he’s locked up in rehab or he would be getting high trying to join her in that one place your mind goes to save yourself from the hurt. Did she really need to lose herself to love me? That one comment that her mate said rolls over inside the walls of my mind. He said she would have taken tabs after tabs of acid to burn all the memories of me from her mind. This is some insane in-depth shit.
Not knowing what to do was making me anxious so I did the only thing I knew would help other than getting high and that was to play. Sitting on the windowsill looking out over the city lights so far below I strummed on my guitar and just played to her, for her and for me and my mind. It worked until she began to choke and convulse. I panicked, dropping my guitar to the floor and stood frozen as her body convulsed up and down on the bed in front of me. The machines started to bleep out loud and long piercing the quiet around us.
I needed to get over to her. Focus, Jay. Fucking move man. I screamed at myself, bro you gotta make sure she is alright. Make sure she is still breathing, and that she isn’t fucking choking on her own fucking puke. SHIT! Finally, after what felt like hours my body moved heavy and slow. As I stepped to the side of her bed my hands went to her body to try and calm her jerking movements. As the gargling noise hit my ears bile rose inside my throat as fear griped at me from the sound alone. Her eyes opened, then rolled back for the first time in a month I get to look into her eyes and there is nothing there but the whites. I slam my hand on the buzzer in the wall over and over until the doors flew open and a team of nurses flew in. They pushed me back and then it all became a blur as I watched machines be wheeled in and doctors coats floating around behind them in hurried movements making them look like super hero capes. “Please, please what’s happening. Please save her, please,” I begged them as no one looked at me, they just passed me by injecting her, moving IV lines and changing bags. Placing vials of fuck knows what into the line in her hand as she continued to convulse and choke and puke up some strange black substance. That tipped me over the edge, watching her puke that up and change color right before my eyes.
What the hell was I supposed to do? Standing there watching when all I wanted to do was touch her, pull her into me and take her away from all this. Baby, please stop, please stop fighting whatever battle you’re fighting and just be still. I whispered to her body as they all hovered over her using raised voices and urgency laced tones. I felt the silent tears fall down my cheeks as my screaming echoed inside my brain with flashbacks from my brother dying in my arms hitting me right in the frontal lobe of my memory bank. I walked to the other side of the room, my hand pulling at the strands of my hair then releasing when a nurse said she’s going into cardiac arrest. I grabbed a decorative vase filled with flowers that was already in this over styled hospital room. I wanted nothing but the best but even that isn’t helping my baby. The vase felt cool in my hand as I smashed it against the wall. I breathed in deeply, trying to calm myself down, but I couldn’t fucking do it. I hoped that feeling would take all the rage of the unknown from my veins, but it didn’t. It just caused the whole room to stop what they were doing and look at me, the shock etched on their faces. “Please tell me what the fuck I am meant to do,” I screamed as I fell against the wall slowly sliding down while tears fell from my eyes.
Completely lost in the whirlwind of what was happening to my baby and not knowing what the fuck I am meant to be doing, I was lost. Watching her felt so fucking wrong. Watching as she broke and fought and lost and puked, the whole scenario felt so wrong, I almost turned my back on the scene in front of me. Almost, but I couldn’t. I was frozen, my eyes on my baby as she fought to not become a ghost at the foot of the bed.
I couldn’t breathe as a nurse crouched down in front of me while my eyes stayed locked on Tru.
Tears flowed down my cheeks. Tears of infuriation and I exploded. “I don’t even know why I’m here. Why the fuck I even bother trying. I’m fighting to get my life back together, and this...” I swept my arm from side to side, indicating the mess. “This is what I’m confronted with. I can’t believe I was stupid enough to fucking worry about her when it’s obvious, she doesn’t give a fuck about me. You know what? I’m done. You’re not fucking worth it!” I crossed the room to the door, picking my way over pieces of the broken vase. “I hope the drugs, and alcohol were worth it.” I slammed the door as I left, causing the pictures on the wall outside to shake and stomped down the hall to the elevator. I trembled with grief as tears ran freely down my face to drip from my chin.
The cool air hit me as I fell outside the hospital doors. I can’t even cope.
“Love can kill distance, just the same way that distance can kill love.”
A voice soft and sweet hits the back of my senses as I lean over the small brick wall gasping for air.
“I just want her to wake up.” I cry out not even ashamed.
“I know you do, and this will take time. That in there is a good sign as much as it shocked you, it’s good, she’s fighting.” Her voice travelled around me holding onto me and wrapping around my ashamed, broken soul.
“I’m so sorry. I don’t even…”
“Shhhh. It’s ok we all know how hard that stuff is to watch. It’s even harder when the person you love is fighting addiction and you are helpless when it just falls apart. We get it.” Her hand finds my shoulder.
“Come on. Let’s just sit,” she says taking my hand in hers, warm meshing with my cold.
