Monday, September 15, 2014

Evil Exists

I had a gun to her head. She had turned me over to the police, made a deal with them so that she could get out of trouble. A week previous, I had come home after doing a burn (making a batch of methamphetamine) with several ounces of meth and took a shower. When I got out of the shower, there were people in my house tearing it apart that identified themselves as police. She had let them in to search. They found the meth I had brought home and arrested me.
When you get arrested, you eventually get out. I got out sooner than she thought I would. They held me for 24 hours and then let me go. She was still there when I showed up at home. I went straight to a stash spot they had not uncovered, grabbed my gun, chambered a round and grabbed her by the hair. I pushed her to the ground while putting my gun to the back of her head.
Time stopped. It was like a slow motion scene in a movie. She started crying, telling me she was sorry.  “I didn’t want to tell on you. They pulled me over with drugs and were going to put me in jail. I didn’t have a choice.” My companion was screaming at me as well, “Pull the trigger, coward. Don’t get scared now. You HAVE to do this.”
At that moment, I only knew a few things. One, I was about to make a choice I could never take back. I prided myself on never hitting a girl, and I was preparing to take one’s life. Second, although I was not sure I wanted to kill her, I knew my companion wanted me to pull the trigger and put her out of her misery. Finally, I knew that my companion was evil beyond anyone or thing I had ever met.
My companion always wanted me to hurt either myself or other people. He was there a lot in the shadows, but he only came around when things were getting ready to turn bad. He would encourage me to do the absolute worst thing. If I was going to collect money, he would remind me to take my gun. If I was in a fight, his would be the voice telling me not to quit punching and kicking long after the fight was over. If I was in a house of people I didn’t know, he would whisper in my ear, “They want to kill you. They are going to kill you. You should get them first.”
If I was thinking about quitting drugs, he would show up and remind me of all the times I had tried to quit and failed. “You have been using for over half your life. You’re never going to be able to quit. This is the only thing you are good at. You are not a quitter. DO IT! You know you want to get high. You can’t live without it.”
This time, my companion was not giving up. He was screaming at me, “Pull the trigger, coward. She tried to take your freedom away.” I turned to look at where the voice was coming from and saw my companion. He was a figure blacker than black. He was standing right behind me, darker than any shadow could possibly be. He was not all smooth lines, but his outline was jagged and rough.
I could never make out any features of his face, as his face was always dark and cloaked in shadow. The most remarkable thing about him was his eyes. They were pulsating, red eyes that burned into me every time he looked at me. The scariest thing was not the eyes, or even him being beside me in my ear but his voice. He never spoke, he shrieked and screamed and yelled. Even his whispers oozed with rage and hate.
People have asked me if he was just a shadow person. He had started out that way. Shadow people are there when you have been up too long. They come out of trees, around corners, run by you so fast you can only catch a glimpse. When you look, the figure fades away, blends in or is gone. You’re mind is unable to explain what you see, so it explains them away to something you can understand.
I was an atheist when my companion was still a shadow person, and did not believe in spirits. I rationalized what I was seeing. I would tell myself it was the wind blowing a branch, or the fact I had been up for a week and had psychosis. Sometimes I thought maybe it was the police watching me, waiting to arrest me. That is the reason so many people think they are being watched when they are not. The shadow people become COMET or DEA to them. That is what they were to me. The problem was, they seemed real and I shared the visions with other people who were with me.
If I was alone I only saw him. When I was by myself, it was just the solitary shadow man. I have talked to some people who saw groups when they are alone. Not me, I generally saw just one. When around other needle freaks, I would see more than just one. They would stand around in a group, almost like they were talking. Maybe our demons were comparing notes or sharing new ways to get us to do things we didn’t want to.
I would explain it away as a group hallucination, telling myself it was sleep deprivation or my mind playing tricks on me. Over time I started seeing him constantly in the shadows, or out of the corner of my eye. The bad part was that I was starting to see him when I was not high. He was always there lurking.
That was how it began for me, with my shadow man. Then I started to hear whispers that I could not quite make out. That advanced to the voice actually speaking to me, telling me what to do. At first the voice was harmless, encouraging my drug use and validating what I was thinking on occasion when I would think out loud. Then it began to tell me to do horrible things, to myself and to others. It was no longer a whisper, it was a scream.  Yelling and nagging at me to do things.
Then one day it appeared before me. I saw something out of the corner of my eye and when I turned to look, it was still there in the shadows watching me. From that day on he would randomly appear next to me, often at the times I was at my weakest, angriest or highest. Always egging me on, encouraging me to do the worst possible thing to either myself or other people.
There were times, like when I was contemplating not using after waking up Sunday, he would show up and remind me that I had never been able to quit and would never be able to. Today I was angry, and it was telling me to do what a part of me wanted and another part of me did not. It was telling me to pull the trigger. I was seriously thinking about it.
I started trying to reason with my companion, “I can’t pull the trigger. I really don’t want to do this.” My girlfriend started talking back to me, thinking that I was talking to her, “Then put the gun down, David. I know you don’t want to shoot me.”  I pulled her head back and started laughing in her face as I told her I wasn’t talking to her. “Who are you talking to then,” she asked? “The demon standing behind me, can’t you see him? He wants me to kill you and part of me wants to kill you as well.”
I am not sure if he showed himself to her or if the craziness of what I said scared her but as she looked behind me her face turned to sheer terror and she started screaming. Not yelling at me like she had been, trying to plead with me. There were no words, just a shrill keening. Her face froze as her eyes went wide.
I had never seen such an intense look of terror before.  The gun to her head had not caused that look of fear, but either her seeing my companion or the insanity she saw in me scared her to death. I took the gun away from her head and pulled her off her knees. “You have one hour to get your stuff and go. You have until tomorrow to be gone. You are going to leave state and go back home. I never want to see you again, or it will be a bad deal,” I told her.
She did not speak. All she did was nod and run out the door. I never saw or heard from her again. She lived with me and she left all of her stuff with me. She left her clothes, make up, purse, everything. She left it all and disappeared.
Looking back now, I hope she made it home and out of her addiction. I pray she is somewhere clean and sober, living a better life in recovery. If you are reading this, and you know who you are, I hope that you can forgive me. You are just one of the people I met in my addiction whose life I wrecked. 
When my shadow person stopped being a shadow person lurking about and started talking to me and had taken form, I stopped being an atheist. I knew that my companion was evil and that he was a spirit. He made me an agnostic, because if he existed than surely other spirits did as well. Or was it all from my imagination and random misfiring neurons in my brain? Was it the drugs working on my brain? Even when I was not high, I still had drugs in my system so it could have been that as well.
I have thought about it for years. I have talked to many other addicts who have shared the same experience that I have with my companion. Due to so many others having very similar if not the same stories, I have come to believe that my companion was a demon, and that when I was using drugs I opened myself up to forces that were evil beyond comprehension.
What is even scarier is the period of my life from 1994 – 2001 and how little memory I have of that 7 years. I almost wonder if I wasn’t possessed for large parts of that time, or if the memories just didn’t form because of all the drugs I was using and the lack of sleep I experienced. I have come to a place where I hold on to a few things about this time in my life so that I can function today:
1.      I know that evil exists and at one period in my life I made very evil choices
2.      I know that nothing good lived in me during my addiction and that all people are capable of doing things they never would believe they would do
3.      I know I am no longer the person I was in my addiction, for I have found a better life in recovery
4.      I know that I have made my life a living amends so that I can help rebuild other people’s lives today instead of destroying them like I once did
5.      I know I believe in a Higher Power I call Jesus that has freed me from my addiction and supports, encourages and guides me in all that I do today

This is actually the rough draft of the first chapter of the book I am writing. I am open to feedback. It is a little rough, but I feel that it gives people an idea of how far down I had gotten in my addiction. I also would ask that if you have had similar experiences or thoughts on what I experiences that you leave comments as I would be very interested in hearing what you have to say.

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