by Poe Bertholon

The half-way house we live in is called Sunrise Woman’s Recovery. There are about thirty of us in total. We don’t all stay here for very long but when one of us leaves to re-enter the real world, or one of us relapses or overdoses, or dies, another woman comes to replace us. And then we’re back to about thirty. It’s not an actual house. That’s always what I pictured when I heard “half-way house”. It actually happens to be five apartments in a pre-existing apartment complex (two next-door apartments on two floors and then one apartment on the ground floor next to the staff apartment). It would probably work better in a house, but big ol’ houses in Atlanta cost about an arm and a leg and this is expensive enough as it is. We each live in one apartment with four other girls. We pee in a cup three random nights a week and we have a curfew. We go to 12 step meetings every day, twice if we’re unemployed, and we stay on a buddy system for our first thirty days. No dating, no overnight visits, no phones during meetings, and absolutely no mind altering substances. That now includes mucinex and muscle relaxers. We’ve had lots of desperate times and there are plenty of resources to quench the cravings if need really and truly be. But those of us still here, that have been here for almost six months, we’re serious about getting clean. We have a community meeting every monday at four, although we’re usually all waiting and smoking cigarettes for about forty-five minutes outside the staff apartment before they let us in. Three girls left this week. One of them died. We’re all pretty quiet because she died in the bathroom of one of the apartments and it wasn’t drug related. It’s more relatable, more digestible to us when it’s drug related. There’s no narcan for suicide when it’s not through overdose. Once we get in the staff apartment, we file into the living room and hand in our schedules for the week. Then we sit around the couch (because only five girls fit on the couch) and we go around and introduce ourselves: Name, drug of choice, sober time, out-patient treatment center, how long we’ve been here. We have three new girls. One of them stands out to us. She’s very pale. She is also very tall. We don’t remember her name because her drug of choice stands out to us. We’re not afraid. We’ve done it all, seen it all, been through it all. Human blood, it’s not for us, but a drug is a drug is a drug. After the community meeting, we all gather in her apartment to hear her story. Apparently she is 219 years old. This does not shock us. We’ve heard it all. She says her kind has evolved to need only fresh blood from animals, or blood from bags they take from the hospital. We can relate to stealing from hospitals. Hospitals have plenty of goods, this is no shock to us. She tells us that she can only drink animal blood on account that she has become addicted to human blood and powerless over the effect that it has on her. She starts to cry and we comfort her. We have become powerless over the effects of many things, we can find compassion in this. Our addiction kills too, we tell her. She cries out that we do not understand, she kills other people to feed. This does not change our demeanor towards her. We each tell her our story. Some of us have driven under the influence and hurt others inside and outside of the car. Some of us hurt others because they had what we needed. Most of us betrayed the trust and the safety of the ones we loved most to get our fix. We are all monsters. We are all broken. We want to get better too.