The blog title is stupid. And emotional. But its true. Often I have sudden surges of memory that rush back to my mind and for five minutes I'm paralyzed and I relive them. Those are the days that I am not myself. Those are the days that I realize I am not the same person I was 5, 6, 7, 8 years ago, and I won't be the same again tomorrow.
My first kiss was on a grassy patch separating my grandmother’s neighborhood from the whir of the inbound traffic on the Edens expressway. He pulled me on top of him and wrapped his legs around me and said, “This is what it should be like”. I agreed. His breath smelled like cigarettes and alcohol and the taste was so much more experienced than I was.
The first time I smoked was on the balcony of our apartment in Shanghai. It was after midnight and I had just been told that I wasn’t really inhaling when I smoked. I sucked in the smoke from the cigarette and covered my mouth and forced myself to suck it down into my lungs. It was a five-minute high, and all I remember was praying, feeling like I could finally hear and see God up in the sky. I was 14.
The first time I drank I was with new friends. We had a bottle of vodka that we stole from my parents, a bottle of sprite, and a carton of orange juice. We watched porn and played a drinking game that involved a shot every time someone said the word “what”. We took a lot of shots. We wandered around the well-manicured grounds of the apartment complex: three drunk expatriates on the other side of the world. I sat on a bench and I bawled for no reason. I was a sad drunk back then. I was 14.
The first time I did drugs I was in a DJ booth at a club whose name I can’t remember. They were passing around a CD case, and on it three white lines had been cut from a little baggy of white powder. They told me it was called Special K, and it would make me feel like I was floating. The four shots of tequila that I had earlier made the decision an easy one. I did float home, in a taxi down the empty A20 highway that led out of downtown Shanghai and into the outskirts of the city. I don’t remember anything. I was 15.
I don’t remember the first time I did ecstasy. I know it happened, I remember the feeling. I remember snippets of the many times I took it after. In clubs, at shows, at home watching TV. I remember seeing the most beautiful moments I’ve ever seen in my life. I remember feeling love for myself and the people around that I had never felt before. I don’t remember anything else. I don’t remember how many times I took it, how many colorful tablets with all their little markings on them I swallowed. I don’t remember how much money I spent or how much I stole from my mom’s sewing box where she kept all her cash. I don’t remember how many people I lied to, and I don’t remember whom I hurt. I know that all these things happened. I just don’t remember. I think I was still 15.
They are shards, fragments, pieces, slivers, images, clips, feelings, locations, neon signs, bottles of liquor, baggies of white powder, tablets engraved with spiders, @ signs (those were the best), and smiley faces, cab drivers, stairwells, cab rides that flew by, packs of Marlboro reds, my friend Vivian’s fridge full of beer, her balcony where she smoked hash, wads of 100RMB bills and midnight cab rides to go see a dealer who lived where the streets and buildings only had numbers and no names and I didn’t belong, and men that made me feel attractive and wanted and worth something. I just have these pieces left that I don’t know what to do with; everything was in pieces then.
The first time someone told me something was wrong with me I was in the office of Steven Devore Best, psychiatrist and neurologist. I yelled and then I cried and then I yelled at my dad and then I kept crying. He said it wasn’t normal for someone to experience that range of emotion in a twenty minute period. I don’t remember what else he said or what else he told me in those 30 minute, $300 sessions. I just remember leaving with lithium, then Trileptal, then Wellbutrin, then Lexapro. I remember thinking that he didn’t like me very much. I was 15.
The first time I felt dead was the next 6 months. I didn’t cry and I didn’t laugh. I didn’t fantasize about committing suicide and how much it would affect my family anymore. It didn’t give me some odd sense of pleasure to listen to the music that I would want to play at my funeral. I fought with my parents less, and I did my homework a little more. But on some level I was angry; and I held onto that anger for a long time. I was almost 16.
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