Upwards Asphyxiation

By Nancy Reese

Finally free to come up for air, I'm once again caught on something holding me under. I try to break free, but it's pulling me down. For what seems like the final time, the light slowly disappears as my body wrenches in attempted gasps for air. The freezing cold pours into my chest and I ache with it. No longer am I fighting for freedom. All I want is for the pain to stop. I embrace my struggle and hope for a quick end. That end never comes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nancy Reese
• Release date: Jun 20, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476229805

Nancy Reese

Nancy Reese lives in Spanish Fork, Utah where she works as a medical assistant. She spends her free time reading and caring for her geckos. She also plays guitar, but rarely has time. She lives with her partner and her partner's two children, and their diverse collection of animals.

Book preview

Upwards Asphyxiation

Nancy Reese

Copyright Nancy Reese 2012

Smashwords Edition

.intro.

Finally free to come up for air, I'm once again caught on something holding me under. I try to break free, but it's pulling me down. For what seems like the final time, the light slowly disappears as my body wrenches in attempted gasps for air. The freezing cold pours into my chest and I ache with it. No longer am I fighting for freedom. All I want is for the pain to stop. I surcease my struggle and hope for a quick end. That end never comes.

Chapter 1 - In The Beginning…

At times, I find myself thinking of all of the ways I can get out of the horrible situation that I have made of my life. I have spent the last four or so years getting high and committing crimes, running from the law, screwing up school and work, and ripping off my parents. When I was getting high, this didn’t seem like such a problem to me, but now that I have two years mostly clean, it’s more than overwhelming. I have hurt so many people, and even though I’m clean, I can’t find a way to stop.

Sometimes I think I should just turn myself in. I’ve been so busy running and hoping to God that I don’t get arrested, and now, at twenty-three years old, I’m as tired as a seventy-year-old. The time in jail would give me time to think and I’m sure would teach me some kind of self-discipline as well. I’ve thought about killing myself, too. I’ll be in the unfinished second floor of my so-called best friend’s mother’s house in Brazil, collecting our drying clothes from the lines they hang on, and I’ll catch myself staring at the power cables that are dangerously close to the house. I’ll want nothing more than to just reach out and grab them. Then I think, no, dying would hurt too much.

What a pussy.

I haven’t always been this bad. I mean, I have in the past, but not for a long time. The last 12 years of my life have been a struggle against myself. For a while, it was thought that I conquered all this, but now, I’m not so sure.

Let me start from the beginning. I was adopted from Texas into a wonderful family. I never met the woman who gave birth to me, so I didn’t really have to feel the pain of separation; consciously at least. I grew up knowing that I was adopted. At one point in my early years, I did sneak through my dad’s old file cabinet and found my adoption record. It contained her name, town of residence, age, reason for adoption, and the fact that her mother had encouraged her. I called her once at some point, and was just hung up on. Recently I was told I have a big brother, about 5 years older than me.

My parents believed, quite rightly, that we were (and still are) just as close as any other family. I grew up in a wealthy suburb of New Jersey, and had everything a kid could ever want. When I was almost two, my parents decided they wanted another little girl, so we went out to Iowa to pick up my little sister. Of course, I don’t remember this, but they tell me the stories.

They told me that I picked out my sister, because in the hospital when they went into the infant ward, they left me with a nurse outside the window, and I said, I want that one! My parents, of course, just happened to be holding the infant at which I was pointing. So anytime after that, when I got mad at my sister, my mom would just say, Well, you picked her!

How annoying.

Right from preschool, I was always that kid that was picked on. There was really no reason for it; I just always managed to be a loser. That is what I let myself become, too. I had friends of course, but mostly I was a loner. In elementary school, I took up the habit of sitting by myself against the building during recess. What kid does that? I don’t know why, I just didn’t want to play. What was the point? The principle, who most kids were scared of, ended up walking me around and talking to me. This did not help my early reputation, but it did take me out of myself for a while.

I was always distracted, not just at school, but everywhere; choir, church, playing with friends. In the first grade, my teacher discovered that all of the work from the beginning of the year - it was now May - was hidden away in my desk, undone. She gave the packet to my mom for me to finish. When my mom saw me working, adding completely unnecessary detail to the work, she took it from me and did it herself. She tells me that there must have been a hundred pages.

School kept getting harder and harder. I don’t mean the work or the learning. Paying attention and staying focused was impossible. I was never happy at school, and found myself taking frequent trips to the bathroom or nurse just to get out of class. I felt like I could never be good enough for my parents. However, I didn’t let that show at home; I was still their happy little girl in pigtails.

Home wasn’t any picnic either. I was not allowed to watch television during the school week, and bedtime was at seven. The summer that I turned eight, my parents decided that we could finally get a dog. There was a catch though; I had to lose 10 pounds by the end of the summer. Now, looking at pictures from when I was this little, you would not say that I was overweight. I did not understand this at all, but it didn‘t matter; I wanted a dog! I limited myself to one snack a day, and sometimes ate less at meals. It was a great summer, though. We belonged to this swim club, on this big pond. One half was for swimming and the other for boats. They had a level system for kids, because there were more dangerous areas of the pond. I think I may have climbed two or three levels that summer. I finally found something for which I had passion enough to pay attention.

I did lose that weight, and at the end of the summer we drove 2 hours away from home to pick up our pure pedigree puppy, a West Highland white terrier named Bridget. I was terrified of her. She would chase me and my sister and all of our friends around the house. Nevertheless, we loved her all the same.

The summers after that were great escapes for me. The church that we had been attending since I was five had many kids that went to a Presbyterian camp about 45 minutes away. The program director came with a slideshow after church one Sunday, and I begged my mom mercilessly to send me there. She signed me up for a week that summer, and I fell in love. It was great, being outdoors all day and night. I discovered that this was a place that had my full attention, and even Bible study proved to be interesting. By the end of the week, I did not want to leave, so my mom signed me up for another.

The following year, I was old enough to go on a weeklong canoe trip on the Delaware River. It was incredible. We packed our hiking packs with all of the clothes we could, wrapped in plastic so they wouldn’t get wet, and got on a bus that took us two hours away from camp. On the river, we saw bald eagles and moose, and there was a fresh water spring that we soon discovered had clay. Of course, being a bunch of 10 and 11 year olds, we covered ourselves in the clay before we left to jump off a 15-foot rock. I did this every summer thereafter.

Soon after, we found out that my mom’s best friend’s daughter Kristi was severely ill with leukemia. Me and my sister never considered Kristi’s family anything other than our family. We referred to Kristi’s parents as Aunt Janet and Uncle Ray, and her and her brother Steven were cousins to us. I was barely ten, so I didn’t understand the severity of Kristi’s illness.