Tristan: Finding Hope

Chapter 1

4 years later…

My life is one bumpy roller coaster. The last few years I’ve been getting high, getting sober. High. Sober. High. Sober. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve gotten clean. I want to say I’ll never do it again, but I’d be the biggest fucking liar on the planet. I’ll probably do it again, because I struggle to find motivation not to do it and being sober just makes me focus on life. You’d think after spending years on a downward spiral, almost OD’ing, losing my sister, falling in love with a girl—Nova Reed—who ended up falling in love with my cousin—Quinton—getting hepatitis C and having to go through a bunch of treatment to get rid of it, that I’d finally point the finger to the drugs and say that they must be doing this all to me. Sometimes I can see it, how fucked up I am on them, and so I try to stop. But I still always fall back to them, the pull too strong, the need to block out too great. I’m an addict. Plain and simple.

Right now, I’m supposed to be a builder. I’ve been spending the last several months on the road working for Habitat for Humanity. It’s actually more Quinton’s thing. Ever since he got sober, he’s been all about helping the world. I think he thinks if he is always doing something good then it’ll make up for the accident, which maybe that’s the case. And I’m happy he found his sanctuary, the place that makes him feel whole without being jacked up on heroin and methamphetamine. I think Nova helps with that too—helps him stay clean.

Me, well I’m not that strong. I don’t really have anyone but myself, which makes it easier to disappear and fall off the cliff again until someone convinces me to climb back up for a little bit. Which is why I’m here. Well, sort of. I was basically dragged into this because Quinton and Nova thought I needed a good distraction from my life of misdirection and bad choices. And they’re probably right. I just wish I could focus more on the distraction instead of the addiction.

“Hey, hand me that nail gun, would you?” Quinton says while messing around with one of the cupboard doors. The house we’re working on right now should be finished by tomorrow and then we’ll be on the road again, to I think Georgia.

Quinton wipes some sweat from his brow as I reach down and pick up the nail gun beside my feet with the hand that’s not holding the cigarette. I give it to him and he shoots a few nails in the side of the house. “I’m fucking hot.” My shirt is soaked in sweat and sticking to my back. “When are we quitting today?”

Quinton sighs. I’m sure he’s getting irritated with my lack of motivation. But he’ll never say anything because of my sister. I think part of him will always blame himself for her death, and for some reason he thinks he needs to be nice to me even when I might not deserve it. “You can take off if you want to, but I think Nova had something planned for tonight.” He puts the nail gun on the ground and picks up a bottle of water. “To celebrate you being hepatitis free and all.”

I shake my head. I just found out yesterday at my doctor visit that I’m officially disease free again and I’m glad. “She knows it’s not normal to celebrate something like that, right? It’s not like I was cured of cancer or something.” I grab my own bottle of water that’s beside the cooler. “I got the disease because I was a fucking idiot and shared needles with a bunch of druggies.”

He scratches the back of his neck, looking uncomfortable, then takes along sip of his water. “Look, man. I totally get the self-blame and everything.” He raises his eyebrows as he puts the lid back on the water. “But trust me, just be grateful you’re clean and healthy now. We can celebrate that, right?”

I want to point out how many times I’ve slipped up on the clean part—the last time being only three weeks ago, a day when I did a line of meth—but I decide to be cooperative since he’s letting me bail on building early. “All right, I’m down for celebrating, but what I’d really like to do is get laid. It’s been a long time.”

Quinton rolls his eyes. “Only you.”

I hold back a smile and shrug, start packing up my tools, thinking about how I’ll go back to the hotel and sit there in the silence, wondering how long I’ll let the empty feeling go on. Maybe I’ll turn on some television, but not to really watch it. Just to hear the noise so I’ll try not to think about all the hell I went through and how much I want to fall back into to it.

But in the end it’s all I’ll think about, no matter what I do.