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Falling is the easy part. You just do it.

One day you’re at your cousin’s birthday party, at eleven, and while the adults aren’t looking, he hands you a cigarette. At that time it seems like a game, the adrenaline of being discovered turns it into one and even the smoke inside your lungs seems pleasant despite coughing and coughing to expel it.

The next day you’re out with your friends, one of them crosses over to the opposite sidewalk to exchange words with a guy in a black hood. He comes back smiling, hands out a few cigarettes to the group, much smaller than you remembered but you know, times change. By the time you can tell the difference in the taste of the smoke it’s too late, everyone is laughing, joking and encouraging you to keep smoking. The effects are good at first, you don’t feel them… until the next day.

And that day is followed by another, and another and days are followed by years.

Then your father dies, in a car accident and you can’t remember anything from the night before. The images run through your head all mixed up, an argument, my mother crying, myself escaping insults, running aimlessly through the streets until someone calls my name. They are my friends and I take refuge in them, in them… and in the smoke and the injections.

They steal a car to make me feel better, they drive it at full speed through the streets; it’s not a big deal for us, we’ve stolen, beaten and even extorted. The thing is, when you see a lady walking at night to the bus stop, you don’t think about helping her. When you see through the windows a twenty-four hour worker alone in the store, you don’t think about just stopping to buy something and that’s it. No.

You only think about getting more, and more because, while your body is poisoned, your mind is healed.

The remorse comes later, the guilt, the “it should have been better” but it’s too late, you can’t change anything and that hurts you, and you know very well the way to push away the pain. You want to change, you can’t. You don’t want to get a shot that day, but you do it anyway. You don’t want to be out in the cold at that time of night, you know mom is home worried about you but your feet don’t come back.

They say it takes 21 days to form a habit. I wish that were a lie. The funny thing about life is that it doesn’t notice the passage of time, it’s just a day. But, when the days come together and the decisions you made torture you, it’s still a day but you’d rather not have opened your eyes to see the sun, the disappointment in some eyes and the hope in others.

Because no matter how bright the sun shines, no matter how cold the wind, no matter how your mother’s smile. Everything around you is black, you try to reach out your hand for help but you come up against a wall, then another, and in that moment you know: you fell.

You are a fallen one.

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