The busy city throbs and hums

The city sweat seeps through my shirt as I push my back up against the cool bricks of lower Manhattans skyscrapers. The city’s stench permeates my already stained clothes. For a moment, in the belly of a dark alleyway hidden from prying vulture eyes, I let my mind leave this unfair reality, but only for a second. I feel the beating of my heart fluttering in my chest as my eyes dart in their sockets from left to right, left to right.

 I stop to let my lungs fill with the bitter city air; burning flames lick the inside of my throat, I can taste the devastation of the city on my tongue. The unusual monotony of my life bites at my heels, a vicious dog after its prey. Before stepping out into the burning furnace of hell, I look over my shoulder. Monsters have a way of creeping up behind you when you least expect it.  I spring my body off the wall and straight into the human traffic of bodies in the flow of everyday life. I weave between the seas of zombies, chin down to my chest, heart racing. I run from it, every day I wake up on the run, even my dreams turn to nightmares of running, running from the monster that haunts my being. Running, always running.

Like a wild beast tangled in a net, the wind roars through the deserted subway tunnels I call my home. This familiar sound brings me comfort. For as long as I can remember, I’ve stayed hidden in these underground jungles, only leaving this sanctuary for essentials. Yet even as invisible as I am down here I find no solitude, my thoughts, like snowflakes on some far-off mountain side, begin accumulating until the truth is loosened, and falls like an avalanche onto my world. I chose this life; I made bad decisions that weigh down my shoulders. I am young, not even 28, yet I seem an old haggard woman with a face of regret.

 As a teenager, I had the face of an angel. Bouncy blonde curls framed my heart shaped face and my eyes, pacific blue, had the ability of mesmerising even the hardest of faces. Then the monster swooped in, its claws ripping away everything that defined me. I was no longer the perfect girl everyone envied, I was the sob story mothers tell their daughters when they first warn them about drugs. I became the monster that tears lives, families, friendships apart. My life became an apocalyptical spiral, one moment I had everything and the next, it was only me. Broke, homeless, addict me.

I am running, I need to claim my life back. I crave Sunday lunches, family time, mothers kisses. I crave Methadone, dealers, injecting my web of veins with a shot of pure, hard, MDS. For seven years I have craved these opposing realities, but I cannot go back. I chose this life of crime and poverty, I chose to get in that car with my mother, I chose to ride to the dealer’s house and as the bullet exited the barrel of the gun, I chose to kill my mom. As the blood spilled onto the pavement from her perfectly blow-dried auburn hair, I began to run.