At sixteen, the plan was simple: find a place to crash. Something temporary. Something to buy time before the world figured out another way to kick you in the teeth. I had no strategy beyond that. I was too stupid to have foresight and too goddamn stubborn to admit I needed it.
I figured maybe that nerdy kid from school—David, the one with the thick glasses who always seemed to be sweating—would let me sleep on his floor. He was the type who liked feeling useful, a bleeding heart who wanted to believe he was part of something bigger than his comic books. I could sell him a sob story.
But his parents weren’t buying.
They barely let me in the door before their suspicion became a tangible thing, thick and sour in the air. They took one look at me—the way I stood, the way I smelled of the street—and saw nothing but a problem waiting to happen. People like that, they can smell desperation. It offends their clean, orderly world.
David, though, felt guilty enough to microwave me some leftovers. Some overcooked chicken and limp vegetables, an offering to the stray animal on his doorstep. It was more kindness than I’d felt in weeks. I ate without tasting it, wiped my mouth, and left.
By the second night, I was behind a dumpster, my back pressed against the cold, corrugated steel. The metal felt solid, a small comfort, the only thing separating me from the wide, open world of actual garbage. The smell was bad, but not as bad as the feeling of being discarded.
I started haunting the arcade. It was the kind of place that didn’t care who you were as long as your quarters were good. The neon hum of old machines, the sharp, frantic clatter of buttons, the droning 8-bit soundtracks—this was my new church. A place where time didn’t exist, where the outcasts gathered like moths to a flickering light. Men too old to be there loomed in the corners, dead-eyed and broken, all of us pretending we had nowhere better to be.
The trick was to blend in. Stay quiet. Move like you belong.
One of the older guys noticed me. I don’t know his name. Never cared enough to learn it. He saw a stray dog and decided to throw it a bone. We stood there, watching some game die on screen. “This’ll make it better,” he said, his voice a low rasp, and pressed a tiny square of blotter paper into my palm.
Red Dragon acid. I didn’t hesitate.
I let it dissolve on my tongue. My mouth went dry. My heartbeat became a frantic, excited drum. And then, the world cracked open. The walls breathed. The lights pulsed with a secret language. The noise in my head, the constant, grinding chatter, it just… went quiet. For the first time in years, everything made a kind of beautiful, terrifying sense.
I wanted more. And more came easy. Reality became optional, and I chose option B every damn time.
Days blurred into nights, nights into hallucinations. Hunger stopped existing. Sleep became irrelevant. I felt like I had escaped without moving an inch.
One night, after too many hits, I woke up in a cemetery. At least, that’s what I thought. The last thing I remembered was laughter, whispers between what I thought were tombstones.
Now, morning had arrived, dragging a chorus of birds with it, their songs slicing through the thick fog in my head. I was lying under a lemon tree. Its sharp citrus scent cut through the layers of sweat and stale smoke clinging to me. I blinked, trying to focus. A few feet away, a man stood next to a woman, just watching me with a kind of stillness that wasn’t anger or judgment. Just… recognition.
I squinted. It was Luis’s dad. Luis—the probation kid, the one whose floor I crashed on sometimes. This wasn’t a cemetery. This was his goddamn backyard.
I had been there for God knows how long. His new wife shifted next to him, uncomfortable, the same way David’s parents had been. I knew what she was thinking: What the hell kind of kid wakes up in someone’s backyard?
But Luis’s dad just stood there, silent, patient. Like he’d seen this kind of wreckage before. He didn’t say a word. Just gave a slow nod. It was an unspoken agreement. He knew I’d leave on my own.
I sat up. There should have been shame. There wasn’t. Just a profound, bone-deep exhaustion. I was tired of dumpsters. Tired of floating through life on borrowed highs. Tired of waking up in places that weren’t meant for the living.
But being tired wasn’t the same as being done.
So, I got up, brushed the dirt off my jeans, and walked away. Leaving behind the tree, the birds, and the man who had looked at me like I was already a ghost.
There was still more road ahead. There always was.
Author’s Note:
My thoughts are this: that chapter isn’t about being a punk or a runaway anymore. It’s about the art of becoming nothing. You get rejected by the “normal” world—the families with their clean houses and their microwaved leftovers—so you decide to reject reality itself.
The arcade, that becomes your new church, a cathedral of blinking lights and buzzing noise where all the other ghosts go to pray. And the acid? That’s your sacrament. It’s not about having fun. It’s about quieting the goddamn screaming in your own head. It’s a chemical crowbar you use to pry open an escape hatch from your own miserable consciousness. For a while, it works.
And Luis’s old man, he’s the silent god in this story. He’s not there to save you or lecture you. He’s seen guys like you before, washed up in the wreckage. He just stands there, watching, recognizing one of his own. His silence, his nod—that’s not forgiveness. It’s just an acknowledgment. A professional courtesy between two men who understand that the world is a hard, ugly place.
So yeah, my thoughts are this: that story is about learning that even oblivion gets boring. Even being a ghost gets old. You can float on that chemical river for a long time, but eventually, you get tired. Tired of the dumpsters, tired of the hallucinations, tired of waking up in places you don’t remember finding.
The decision to walk away at the end isn’t some heroic choice to get clean. It’s just exhaustion finally winning out over self-destruction. It’s the moment you realize that being alive, as shitty and painful as it is, is still a hell of a lot more work than being dead. And you might as well get on with it.
