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خطوة إلى عالم لا حدود له من القصص

الاستماع والقراءة

Laura Andrade

Jean Knight Pace

In the 80s, cocaine was everywhere. You could get it at any club or bar. From friends or roommates.

My first line came by way of my roommate Peg. Two neat rows of the silky white powder on the back of a cassette tape cover.

Looking back, it seems strange how I was willing to trade my life for that moment of freedom. But we were all trading something. Peg would be dead a few years later, the victim of a car accident. She would never know how it felt to live through the consequences of a life on drugs. She would never heal. Or suffer. I would.

But for now, I was just getting started.

Enjoy the first installment of the memoir, Four Seconds.

Belinda Lams

Four Seconds

Four Seconds to Fall: Part One, Hawaii

After twelve years in Hawaii, I was ready for a new start. Six months later, I was in San Diego.

 

I felt like a new woman. I was ready to be a new woman. For the first time in eight years I was ready to give up drugs—not just put them away for a pregnancy or ignore them while I was visiting my parents. For the first time since I’d started using cocaine, I was ready to be done.

 

And for the first time in eight years, I was in a place where I felt like I could be done. The old friends and familiar clubs were gone.

 

A door had opened for a brand new me to walk through. And I did.

 

For about five months….

Keep reading in the second installment of Four Seconds!

(Trigger Warnings: Contains NON-graphic content pertaining to drug use and the discovery of child abuse.)

Four Seconds to Break: Part 2, California

With a new life in a new state and more money coming in than Miguel and I had ever imagined possible, you might have thought I’d arrived. 

In a way, I had. Twelve years clean. Two thousand miles away from the old life I’d once lived. Money in the bank. Now when people met me, I looked like a respectable housewife, not an ex-felon. 

But life, she has a way of throwing curve balls. Especially, since distance and time hadn’t given me any magical coping skills. On the contrary, without drugs, I’d turned to any other substances I could use as a bandage when I felt scraped up.

And I felt scraped up a lot. 

My leg still hurt constantly. My husband had taken a job in a city out of town. And my daughter was struggling to find her footing in adulthood. 

So I smoked like a steam engine and drank like a fish. I got angry at the smallest provocation, and raged at anything bigger. My life, once again, was beginning to pull apart at the seams. 

If I was going to survive, I needed more than a quadruple shot of espresso and a pack of cigarettes. 

I needed, somehow, to find my way home. 

***

Enjoy the beautiful conclusion of Laura's story in part 3, Four Seconds to Heal, Indiana.

Four Seconds to Heal: Part 3, Indiana

Four Seconds - سلسلة الكتب

Four Seconds - سلسلة الكتب

Four Seconds كتب بالترتيب

الاستماع والقراءة