u/brianjfed

I’m genuinely curious about something and I want to ask it respectfully. In a way that won't hurt people's feelings. Because this is a question I have and there's nothing wrong with asking a question.

I’ve lived in Tracy since 1996, and over the last several years I’ve noticed how much more diverse our community has become. I think that’s a great thing. We have people from so many different cultures, backgrounds, and traditions now, and it’s changed the feel of the city in a big way.

One thing I’ve been wondering about is how different immigrant communities connect with the larger local community.

I'm speaking mainly about Indian families that move to Tracy. Some families seem to become involved in local events, neighborhood activities, schools, businesses, and community spaces pretty quickly. But others seem to stay more connected within their own cultural circles, at least from the outside looking in.

Almost as if they are choosing to shut out the culture of their surrounding communities. Things like learning the language or the traditions or even meeting their neighbors. I have lived and known people who lived in neighborhoods filled with Indian families but they never made an effort to meet their neighbors.

I’ve noticed this sometimes with parts of the Indian community in Tracy, and I want to be clear that I’m not saying this applies to everyone. I’ve met plenty of Indian people, especially younger people, who are very involved and connected locally. But I’m curious if there are cultural, generational, language, religious, family, or social reasons why some families may prefer to stay more closely connected within their own community rather than becoming more involved in the broader local community.

I’m not saying anyone should have to give up their culture or change who they are. I actually think keeping culture alive is a beautiful thing. I’m just curious about what makes some communities blend into the larger community more quickly while others build stronger internal communities first.

I’d really like to understand it better from people who have lived that experience.

I can picture her face perfectly in my head but not any movies she's been in or her name. Almost like a cross between Aubrey plaza and Kristen Stewart but it's not either of them I can think of her face perfectly but I cannot for the life remember anything about her can anyone help

The story is about addiction, grief, loneliness, withdrawal dreams, and the strange way the mind can start healing you before you even realize it’s trying to.

It's unfinished there's one more dream I have to write. I’m calling it “Therapy in the Dark” for now. Please tell me what you think.

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When you have lived completely numb for years, the return of any emotion can feel terrifying. Joy and compassion do not come back gently. They arrive as strangers wearing familiar faces.

Once, they were the lifeblood you survived on, the oxygen moving through every part of you. But somewhere along the way, you learned to live without breathing. You forgot the air was gone. Then one day, some small tenderness slips through the numbness, and the moment you recognize it, you begin to suffocate. Not from its presence, but from the sudden, devastating awareness of its absence.

Because in this new world, things like companionship, purpose, and joy have become luxuries too elusive to behold. And as I renounce the substances I used to numb myself for so long, I do so with the understanding that I no longer possess the lifeblood that once eased me through this cold, spiteful world.

.

The first of these dreams came without warning.

It happened after a day of confronting my secrets. After sitting across from my father and admitting that I had once again fallen prey to the disease that has plagued my family for decades. I was coming closer to the one-year anniversary of the day I quit fentanyl and meth for good after a seven-year run, and I had to admit to myself and to the people who loved me that I had not been absent from all substance use.

I had found another leash.

It came cleverly disguised as a smoke-shop product labeled as kratom, an herbal supplement I had used in the past to help with opiate withdrawals. At least, that was what I thought I was buying. That was what I let myself believe.

I was in a quagmire of sorts. I had returned home to Northern California after spending nearly six months away in treatment, and then building a life for myself down in Orange County. I had intended on staying there permanently. The life I left behind in the Central Valley was no life to return to. I had burned every bridge I had. I had destroyed my once-great reputation and left a wake of destruction behind me a mile wide.

I thought I would never return to the city of Tracy.

That was, of course, until my mother was diagnosed with brain cancer.

A glioblastoma. A tumor the size of a golf ball that, in a few short months, began to decimate a once vibrant and charismatic woman. Being the oldest child and our family’s namesake, I did not hesitate to fulfill my role as supporter of the family. I did so proudly, even with the humiliation that came with returning to the place where I had made such a fool of myself.

Only now, I had no support group. No recovery community. No real structure to hold me together. I was essentially on my own. If I was going to stay clean, I would have to work extra hard at it, because there was nothing physically stopping me from going back to using if I wanted to. And if I did, I knew it would destroy my family in the process.

My father needed me to look after the family store and handle the list of things my mother once did. He also needed me to take care of things he usually handled, but no longer could, because nearly every waking minute of his life was spent either at my mother’s side, in meetings with doctors, or researching anything he thought might help her gain a foothold on the battleground against that vindictive enemy called cancer.

For the first few months, I was okay.

The adjustment was hard, but I made it. I will not get into too much detail about that time, other than to say it was dull and sad in a way that seemed almost designed for grief. I had lived in this valley nearly all my life, and for the first time I could remember, the sun did not come out for over a month. Overcast skies and clouds every single day. It was almost too fitting for the circumstances.

Every day, I worked the family store. I fed and walked all three dogs. I tended to my grandmother and handled whatever else was needed of me. I was not getting paid, but I had enough money saved from my time away to get by. Around sixty-five hundred dollars, to be exact.

I told myself I was fine.

Then, about three months in, I started to experience sudden and intense withdrawal symptoms from the Sublocade injection I had received months earlier. Sublocade had been my insurance policy. A slow-dissolving promise buried under the skin of my stomach that kept the monster quiet. But the promise ran out before my insurance came back.

I tried desperately to get another injection, but without insurance, I was looking at a few thousand dollars for one shot. Money I did not have. Time I could not spare. And a body that was beginning to scream.

After weeks of fighting it, I remembered kratom. I had used it before during withdrawals, years earlier, and back then it seemed mostly harmless. So I went to the smoke shop looking for relief.

That was where I found 7-OH.

The bottle said kratom, and the man behind the counter sold it to me like it was just a stronger extract. A cleaner shortcut. Something small and manageable. God, how badly I wish I had known what I was getting myself into.

The first few times I took it, I did not feel high. If I had, I probably would have avoided it. But it treated the withdrawals. It softened the crashing depression that had come on so suddenly. For the first time in weeks, I slept. For once, the endless rambling machinery of my mind went quiet.

It was nice.

That was the trap.

I do not know exactly when I realized I was getting high from it, but by then I had been taking it for weeks. And after doing the research I should have done before ever putting it in my body, I realized I had gotten hooked on another opiate. Ashamed of my mistake i hid this from everyone and tried to get by for six months. As i slowly burned through any money i could get my hands on. Absolutely destroying any chance at rebuilding my life. And as always i landed at the bottom before i asked for help.

The shame of that realization was almost unbearable.

I had not gone back to fentanyl. I had not gone back to meth. But I had still found a way to hide from the world. I had still found something to stand between me and the full weight of my own life. The situation surrounding my life was horrible to be sure. My mother was one of the best friends i had in this world. That women means everything to me and the thought of her as she is now is too painful to bare on a daily basis. Along with the wreckage of my past and old guilt building up in my chest my soul is a barrel of negative emotions waiting to burst open. And i only know one way of dealing with that kind of pain. Which is to not deal with it and hide behind a substance that numbs all that pain away.

And now, as I tried to stop, the numbness began to thin.

That was when the dreams came back.

DREAM 1. RELAPSE AND GUILT

In it, I was living with my father again, but not as a man. Not as the oldest son. Not as the one everyone needed to hold things together. I was a teenager again somehow, or at least something close to one. Grown, but powerless. Old enough to know better and young enough to sneak out anyway.

The house was quiet in that strange way houses are quiet in dreams. Too quiet. Like every wall was holding its breath.

I remember moving through the dark carefully, trying not to wake anyone, with that old familiar sickness blooming in my stomach. Not withdrawal exactly. Not yet. Something worse. Anticipation. The private little thrill of doing something I already hated myself for. The feeling of becoming two people at once: the one climbing out the window, and the one watching him do it, begging him to stop.

Curtis was waiting outside.

Of course it was Curtis. Dreams have a cruel way of casting the right people.

He stood in the street under a dead orange streetlight, all bones and shadow, grinning at me like we were kids about to steal beer from somebody’s garage. But there was nothing young in his face. He looked used up. Hollowed out. Like life had chewed on him and spit him back into the shape of a man.

“Come on,” he said.

And I went.

That was the part that scared me most when I woke up. Not that he was there. Not that there were drugs. Not even what happened after.

It was that I followed him.

We ended up behind the Safeway dumpsters, where the pavement always seemed wet even when it had not rained. There were people everywhere. Addicts moving through the dark in loose, broken circles. Some leaned against the walls. Some sat on curbs with their heads hanging between their knees. Some paced back and forth like trapped animals. Others stood perfectly still, staring through the world with eyes that looked like the person inside had already left.

They looked like zombies, but that word feels too easy.

Zombies do not know what they are.

These people knew.

Or at least they had known once.

That was worse.

And then they saw me.

Their faces changed.

People who had looked empty a second before suddenly came alive. They smiled. They laughed. They called out to me like I had been gone on some long trip and had finally made it back.

“There he is.”

“I knew you’d come back.”

“Look who finally showed up.”

One of them grabbed my shoulder. Another pulled me into a hug. Thin arms. Sharp bones. That strange addict affection that always feels half genuine and half like being searched for loose change.

They were happy to see me. Not disappointed.

Not surprised.but Happy.

Like I belonged there. Like I had only been pretending to leave.

And in the dream, I smiled back. That was the first thing that scared me.

The smile. The comfort of it.

The way my body remembered the rules before my mind could object. I knew where to stand. I knew who to avoid. I knew who was sick, who was holding, who was lying, who was dangerous, and who was only dangerous because they were scared. I knew how to read the little movements, the glances, the folded bills, the sudden silences, the fake laughter, the way everyone pretended not to notice the same thing.

It was disgusting.

And I knew how to exist there.

Curtis led me toward a bathroom at the edge of the lot. One of those park bathrooms made of concrete and bad decisions. The kind that always smells wet, even when it has not rained. The kind with metal stalls, scratched-up walls, no mirrors, and a drain in the center of the floor that never drains anything good.

People moved in and out of it constantly.

In and out. In and out.

Like insects returning to a wound.

Nobody looked embarrassed. Nobody looked ashamed. Nobody looked like they expected anything better.

It was just the place. The place you went. The place everyone knew about.

The place that did not need a sign because desperation has its own map.

Curtis pushed the door open, and the smell hit me like a hand over the mouth.

Human shit everywhere.

On the floor. Smeared against the wall. Dried in the corners. Fresh near one of the stalls. Piss ran in thin yellow rivers toward the drain. Wet paper towels had been mashed into the concrete. There was old blood near the sink and burn marks on the counter. The air was thick with rot, chemicals, sweat, and something sourer than death.

It was the kind of filth that should have made a person turn around immediately.

But nobody did.

People stepped around it casually, like puddles after rain.

A man stood by the sink with his pants halfway up, not washing his hands, not looking at anyone. A woman cried silently in the stall with the door open. Two guys argued in whispers near the corner. Someone laughed. Someone coughed until it sounded like their lungs were tearing loose. Someone asked if anybody had a lighter.

The whole room was alive with sickness. And I was calm.

That was the worst part.

I was calm in a bathroom full of shit, surrounded by people who looked half dead, waiting to score drugs I knew could destroy what little life I had managed to drag back from the fire.

I should have been horrified.

Part of me was.

But another part of me settled into it with a familiarity that felt like relief.

The relief of not having to pretend. The relief of being back in a world where no one expected me to be strong, or useful, or clean, or good. A world where no one needed me to be the oldest son. No one needed me to run the store, answer the phone, feed the dogs, comfort my father, understand the doctors, pray for my mother, or act like I was not breaking apart under the weight of all of it. I could be nothing. And that was okay. I didnt have to work hard at anything or push myself to achieve something. I didnt have to feel pain or deal with the depression that haunted me.

Curtis crouched near the wall like the bathroom was an altar.

Someone handed him something. I do not remember who. In dreams, the hands matter more than the faces. The exchange happened with the awful casualness of passing a cigarette. Like it was normal. Like this was normal. Like a room full of human waste and dying people was just another place people went when the rest of the world had no use for them.

We went outside to the dumpsters around the back and crouched down. Curtis without warning grabbed my wrist and pulled my arm out. Another junkie tied a belt around my bicep and a third held my shoulder back. I didnt fight them this is what i came here for. Suddenly curtis pulls out this old rusty used syringe filled with what i know is a mixture of fentanyl and meth. And he asked me “are you ready?”

My mouth spoke before my mind could catch up and i said “yeah” Before the part of me that loved my mother, and feared my father’s disappointment, and wanted so desperately to be anything other than what I had been, could throw itself between me and the old hunger.

For one impossible second, I could feel the future waiting inside that choice. Or the infinite lack of a future.

The lie of relief.

The warm collapse.

The chemical mercy.

The trap door opening beneath me.

Then something in me recoiled.

Not courage.

Not strength.

Fear.

Pure, animal fear.

I saw my surroundings Really saw it. The shit on the floor. The piss. The blood. The people moving in and out like ghosts assigned to haunt the place they died. I saw Curtis grinning from the other side of the life I had escaped. I saw myself standing there, comfortable.

That was what broke the spell.

Not the ugliness.

The comfort.

“No,” I said.

But it did not sound brave. It was less than a whisper and nobody heard me. He brought the syring edown to my arm and i felt the needle poke my vein. Not puncture it mind you just poke the skin.

I wish i could say i had a rush of clarity but what i had was an overwhelming wave of fear and panick overtake me. I yanked my arm back and shouted “NOOO…. No i dont want it” collecting myself and refusing more confidently i said no not right now.

Curtis just shook his head like I had disappointed him, and without a moments hesitation he injected the needle into his own arm. Within seconds he started foaming at the mouth and convulsing. He fell to the floor. . . . he was overdosing.

This is a situation i was all to familiar with and procedure took over i turned around and started shouting for a narcan. I had saved five people from overdose before. I wont tell you how many i didnt save but tried to. But as i began to search the junkie zombies began rushing to him and suddenly a mass of scrawny sickly, wound covered bodies began piling up over curtis keeping him from me.

I got up and ran from the area.

Outside, the air was cold and gray. The crowd turned toward me as I ran through them, but no one tried to stop me. They only watched. Some smiled. Some shook their heads. One of them called my name with a softness that almost made me turn around.

Almost.

I ran past the dumpsters.

Past the wet pavement.

Past the orange streetlight.

Past the place where everyone had been so happy to see me return.

I ran until the dark began to thin.

Then the sun started coming up.

Not beautifully. Not like in movies. It rose pale and tired over the roofs of buildings I did not recognize, spreading a weak gray light across the streets. The kind of sunrise that does not promise a new beginning so much as reveal the damage you had been lucky enough not to see in the dark.

I knew I had to get home.

Back to my father’s house.

Back to the quiet rooms.

Back to the life I had snuck out of.

But the streets would not take me there.

Every turn led somewhere else. Every road bent wrong. I would see a house that looked familiar at the end of a block, start toward it, and suddenly find myself in front of a sober living home I had never been to but somehow recognized.

The door would open before I touched it.

Inside, men sat on donated couches drinking bad coffee out of Styrofoam cups. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead. Someone was always sharing. Someone was always crying. Someone was always saying they were grateful to be alive in a voice that made me want to tear my own skin off.

I backed out and tried another street.

Another house.

Another door.

Another sober living room.

Folding chairs. Chipped mugs. Cigarette smoke clinging to hoodies. Rules taped to the refrigerator. A chore chart on the wall. Some guy with dead eyes talking about hope. Everyone nodding because nodding was easier than admitting they were scared.

I kept trying to get home.

But every door led to another room full of people trying not to die.

Church basements.

Living rooms.

Halfway houses.

Meeting halls.

One desperate room after another, all filled with people clapping because someone had survived the night.

And I remember thinking, even inside the dream, that this was what my life had become.

Not a clean escape.

Not a road back.

Just one room after another.

One morning at a time.

When I finally woke up, I was already gasping.

Not because I had used.

I had not.

Not because anyone had died.

No one had.

I woke up terrified because the dream had shown me something worse than relapse.

It showed me that the door was still there.

And some part of me still knew the way back.

You know when you have one of those dreams that fucks with you all day long?

Yeah. That’s what this was.

The entire day, I was on edge. The imagery from the dream felt burned into my retinas, and I kept rubbing the vein on the inside of my left arm where I had felt the needle prick.

At the time, I had been living at our shop with a guy named Matt, who worked for the family business. I slept in a small, dingy, run-down trailer on the property, and that was where I started every morning.

But this day was different.

This day was nerve-racking from the moment I opened my eyes.

We were supposed to start preparing for a large party my dad had decided to throw for my mother. Her most recent MRI results were not good, and he wanted to make sure all her friends and family had a chance to see her while she was still somewhat able to handle a social situation like that.

I can tell you honestly, I was not worth a shit when it came to helping out that day.

I was anxious, guilt-ridden, and plagued by everything I had been trying not to think about. My self-worth was at an all-time low.

I had worked out a plan with my father to taper down off the 7-OH before getting my next Sublocade injection that Friday. Three months earlier, I had found a street clinic and started getting my injections again, and the plan had always been to stop the 7-OH once I was back on Sublocade. I knew I had protection from the worst of the withdrawal symptoms now that the medication was back in my system.

But every single time I reached the point where the 7-OH was completely out of my body, everything I had been ignoring came rushing back.

All of it.

The emotions that came with everything I was dealing with, and everything I had been running from for the last seven years, surfaced all at once. The grief. The guilt. The shame. The fear. The memories. The reality of my mother dying. The reality of what I had done to my life. The reality of who I was still terrified I might become.

For the sake of clarity, from now on, I am going to call that big wave of anxiety and depression I keep allu