Fire by DEE LEAN

Fire by DEE LEAN

Fire.

Flame engulfed me.
I would have died if not for the amount of alcohol I’d consumed.

Bright lights from the hospital blind me.

I get up and fish around my melted handbag. Find a cigarette and walk toward the doors, dragging a drip with one hand and holding a fire blanket around me with the other.

I light up.

Hearing frantic yelling, I glance back the way I came. I’m being told to go back inside.

I nod and hold up the hand with the needle pierced through a vein. Showing five fingers. There is no pain. Not yet. That comes later. When it comes, it’s unbearable. During surgery I wake up while the skin is being stripped from my thighs. They quickly knock me out again but not before I let off a blood-curdling howl that can be heard down the hall.

For three months I was drugged so heavily I could barely bathe myself.

A morphine and drug addict. Up to 37 pills a day. I sometimes wished for death to take me in my sleep.  But he never did, the selfish prick. The nightmares would wake me up crying. The daily pain was beyond comprehension.  Then later the beginning of withdrawals almost left me for dead again.

Most of this I’ve blocked away in a safe place to keep me from living it over and over again.

But my insecurities will creep back occasionally to remind me that I’m broken.

Sometimes I think about my life draining out of me and wonder why it crept back in.

******

***Dee Lean believes that a writer that doesn’t write is like a soul without a mate; aimlessly wondering without a purpose. Born in Belfast, Ireland, Lean currently lives in Melbourne, Australia and is a single mother to two gorgeous kids that get her up and inspire her to see and seek the good in all. When people ask her what she does, she simply says, “I write.” She tweets at: https://twitter.com/Dede18  ***