You go through life thinking everything’s perfect until you realize how much better it can get. Human nature, or: greed. Adam’s apple.

You get handed a little bag of happiness, and you don’t need world peace anymore; you’ve found it. After all, finding true happiness is tiresome and boring. So you take another hit, pop another pill. There are no wars in the minds of the deluded.

Then you come back to the real world, by one means or another, and realize how dull it’s become; how dull it always was. You come back to the real world through fear, trauma, or rehab. So you look for new ways to be happy. You might find Jesus, or the right doctor. One way or another, you’re determined to find an alternate means. A different way to get the same high.

All the while, you’re thinking, If I hadn’t started in the first place, or maybe, I wonder if I can get one more?

A miracle is being performed across town: a child is being born. But that’s nothing to you, because at one point, you knew the meaning of life. Only to forget it once you’d sobered up.

You get a call from your parents about how much they love you, or don’t, but none of that matters, because now, you know that it’s possible to fly. Possible to do the impossible.

The world around you is a blank canvas. You stare at it, looking for action, looking for color or movement. But it’s only canvas, and you’ve seen the Mona Lisa.

All the while, you’re thinking, Everything could be so much better....

For some people, it takes an intervention to go clean. Others don’t, and die like the rest of us, but not like the rest of us. Some have a religious experience, or their supply runs out; same thing. Then, there’s the few of us that need that one moment, that one thought that will turn us around.

People will tell you they saw the light, and it was good. Me, I saw one of my good friends drown no more than twenty feet from me, and it was not.

It was our weekend ritual. Convince our parents that we were spending our precious Friday nights out to do homework with classmates while we got all the hard drugs and alcohol we could find.

After collecting said drugs and alcohol, we’d find our way deep into middle suburbia. Our latest hangout was my friend Sean’s house. If you had a backyard pool in Northern Virginia, your fifteen minutes of fame lasted for the duration of the Spring and Summer. Sean was the lucky bastard with the pool, and subsequently, the host of our tripping experience.

He was a good host, and a great friend. I say ‘was’, because the pool I’m talking about, it’s the one I watched him drown in.

Sean’s parents were gone for the weekend, so naturally, this was an open invitation to do whatever we wanted. Dan, Sam, Richard and I flocked over without hesitation, bringing bags, bottles, and money. This all took place during high school, before Sam and Richard joined rival gangs in DC. Before Dan killed himself in prison. When life was good. When it took just fifteen minutes to go from the ground to the sky. When it was possible to do the impossible.

Before going to prison for possession and trafficking of large amounts of cocaine, Dan told me to write this story. About the night I went clean, but moreso, in memory of Sean. He told me to write about what happened to Sean, and what it did to us. Or something like that. With another drag on his cigarette, he made me promise to change all of our names.

Sirens would wail, police would question, and Dan would be the only one with Sean. Or what was Sean. Dan was the only one with nothing to lose. The only one who could accept the blame from Sean’s parents, and his neglecting own.

Richard, Sam, and I wouldn’t sleep for days. With that, everything became less animated, and more clear. I’d touched the sky, seen the hand of God, and came crashing back down to Earth all in one night. And all I felt was cold. No amount of coffee or comfort could warm me. Or Sean.

After you quit taking drugs, even if you only used them recreationally, the world becomes your worst enemy. You’ve recognized your addiction, and that’s not what scares you. What scares you, is that you may never be as satisfied as you were before. You’ll always be hungry for something that you know you can’t have. Something you wouldn’t need to worry about if you hadn’t started in the first place.

Your cravings become a drug themselves. They change how you act, how you feel, how you think. And the world is your worst enemy, because it isn’t as exciting anymore. It’s canvas without paint. A book without words. The real world is just one big disappointment, compared to the one you’ve seen.
And people will criticize you for this. Because ignorance is bliss. They’re happy with what they’ve been given, because they know of nothing else. Imagine if God hadn’t told Adam about the forbidden fruit. Imagine if you’d never taken drugs.

Nobody noticed that Sean had gotten into the pool. Dan and I were busy educating Sam and Richard on different strains of marijuana, while passing a joint in circles around the patio furniture. At this point, we were all drunk and high enough not to notice that Dan’s ecstacy was missing. Too drunk and high to remember the simple irony in Sean having a pool in his backyard, and not being able to swim. He was eighteen and invincible. Was, meaning: not anymore. He wasn’t suicidal, he was in the wrong place, in the wrong frame of mind. With the amount of ecstacy and liquor he’d taken, he probably didn’t even know he was in the pool until he’d stepped off the underwater ledge that followed into the deep end.

He didn’t struggle. He didn’t even fight for air.

Every weekend, we climbed to new heights, we saw the world in a kind of way that made you feel truly happy to be alive. Until you weren’t. You could only climb so high before crashing back down again, in one way or another.

For some people, it takes a religious experience. For others, death, or worse: intervention. For me, it was that one moment. Sean had showed me something that years of school, guidance, and anti-drug campaigns hadn’t. He showed me that the worst can happen. And it did.

Years later, I can’t tell if I feel the way I do because of seeing Sean die, or the fact that being clean bores me. I just hope that Sean forgives us for not paying more attention to him then, so I write his story now. Not my story, his. I try to put words back in the book. I’m trying to put paint back on the blank canvas that’s the real world.