05/05/2026
Excerpt: Chapter 23 “The last time I left”
The last time I went to detox, I did not announce it.
There was no moment where I told everyone I was ready. No speech, no promise, no sense that this was the one that would finally stick. I had said that before, too many times, and I did not believe myself anymore.
I just went.
By then, detox was not unfamiliar. I knew the intake questions before they asked them. I knew the way they looked at you when you said how much you had been using, the quick calculation happening behind their eyes. I knew which chair I would sit in, how long it would take before they came back with paperwork, how the first few hours would stretch.
There is something that happens when you have been somewhere enough times.
It stops feeling like a place you go to get better.
It starts to feel like a place you go to pause.
I remember thinking that as I sat there, waiting to be brought in. Not hopeful. Not hopeless. Just tired in a way that did not feel dramatic anymore.
The kind of tired that settles into your bones.
They took my vitals. Asked the same questions. When was your last use. What did you take. How much. Any history of seizures. Any thoughts of harming yourself. I answered automatically, my voice steady, detached from the reality of what I was saying.
I had learned how to sound calm even when I was not.
That was part of the problem.
The room they brought me to was the same as the others. A narrow bed, thin blanket, walls that had seen too many versions of the same story. People coming in broken, leaving with intention, and sometimes coming back again.
I lay down and stared at the ceiling.
This part is always the same.
The waiting.
Waiting for the drugs to leave your body. Waiting for your mind to catch up to your decisions. Waiting to see if this time will feel any different than the last.
I wish I could say something shifted right away.
It did not.
The first days were what they always were. Restless. Uncomfortable. My body trying to remember how to function without what I had been giving it. My thoughts moving in circles, landing on the same questions they always did.
How did it get this bad again.
Why couldn’t I just stop.
What is wrong with me.
No one says those questions out loud in detox, but you can feel them in the room. In the silence. In the way people look at the floor instead of each other.
We were all asking the same thing.
I kept to myself more this time. Not because I did not understand the value of connection, but because I was running out of things to say. Running out of ways to explain something that did not make sense even to me.
There is a point where talking starts to feel like repetition.
And I had repeated this cycle enough.
Staff would come in and check on me. Ask how I was feeling. Encourage me to think about next steps. Treatment. Support. Plans for when I left.
I nodded.
I always nodded.
I knew what came after detox. I had done it before. I had sat in treatment, listened, participated, said the right things, made the right commitments.
And still found my way back.
That is the part people do not understand when they look at addiction from the outside. It is not a lack of knowledge. It is not a lack of awareness. It is not even a lack of desire to change.
It is something deeper than that.
Something that does not respond to logic the way it should.
On one of the last nights, I sat on the edge of the bed and looked around the room, trying to take it in without letting it turn into something bigger than it was.
Just a room.
Just a bed.
Just another stay.
But it did not feel neutral.
It felt like a line.
Not the kind you announce. Not the kind anyone else could see. Just something internal, quiet, but clear enough that I could not ignore it.
I knew I could come back here again.
That option had never been taken away from me.
That was part of what made it so dangerous.
Detox can start to feel like a safety net instead of a turning point. A place you can return to when things fall apart, which means part of you stops fighting as hard to keep them together.
Because somewhere in your mind, you know there is always somewhere to land.
Sitting there, I understood that in a way I had not before.
This could not be a place I kept coming back to.
Not because it was bad. Not because it did not help in the moment.
But because I was using it as part of the cycle.
That realization did not come with relief.
It came with weight.
Because if this was the last time I wanted to be here, then whatever came next would have to be different.
And I did not know yet what that looked like.
I lay back down and pulled the blanket up, staring at the same ceiling I had stared at before, in other rooms, in other moments that were supposed to be turning points.
I did not make a promise.
I did not tell myself this was it.
I just held the thought quietly.
I do not want to come back here again.
That was all.
It was not loud.
But it stayed.
Copyright © 2026 by Jocelyn Ezechiel
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or distributed without permission from the author, except for brief quotations in reviews.
Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect privacy.
Published by Healing Out Loud Publishing
First Edition, 2026.
