party of one

For five years, I threw myself the same party, but in different venues. The office bathroom between meetings. A random parking garage. The kitchen at 3am while everyone slept upstairs. Hotel rooms. Airport stalls. Anywhere I could lock a door or find five minutes alone. The locations changed. The guest list never did.

We talk about addiction as if it destroys relationships, as if substances drive wedges between people who once connected. But I didn’t lose relationships to drugs. No, I nurtured the most intimate of relationships. With drugs. The party required solitude. I designed it that way.

I wasn’t lonely. I was alone. Deliberately alone.

You can’t maintain a relationship with substances and with people simultaneously. One demands privacy, predictability, complete control. The other demands presence, compromise, vulnerability. I chose the party where I made all the rules.

Nobody could know. Knowledge would generate opinions, concerns, interventions. Awareness would turn my private celebration into a problem. So I kept it contained. Just me, just the drugs, just the careful choreography of staying hidden.

Until that fateful afternoon at the golf clubhouse. Maybe my tolerance had peaked. Maybe the supply was different. Maybe after five years of perfect control, I’d stopped being careful about the one thing that required impeccable attention to detail.

Blackout. Then sirens. Then the back of an ambulance and a voice I didn’t recognize: “If we don’t get this Narcan in him in thirty seconds, he’s gone.”

The one time I lost control of the guest list, the party crashers saved my life.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​