The hole-y ghost

A disappearing act.

“Ghosts are just people who ran out of candy.” - Anonymous

At first, like every sensible drug addict, I refused to believe I was disappearing.

So I called tech support.

“My laptop is broken,” I complained. “The fingerprint sensor isn’t working.”

“Sir, we just sent the unit back to you in working order.”

“You didn’t fix the fingerprint reader,” I grumbled.

Soon afterward, the sensor on my phone stopped recognizing me too.

It turned out my devices were working fine.

My fingers were the problem. The tips were charred and calloused. And my thumb, forever flicking a lighter, was dead to me.

Eventually, I had to give up fingerprint login entirely. I had burned off the parts that made me unique.

This is the way the life of an addict begins: The world starts having trouble recognizing you. Then you have trouble recognizing yourself.

The holes came next. When someone entered the room unexpectedly, I’d stash the searing pipe in a pocket, and it would burn right through, eventually tumbling out at my feet. You could mark the progress of my addiction by how many pockets had holes in them. Eventually, I’d become a two-pocket junkie. Then, a full four-pocket graduate.

My phone, wallet, even my pipe would shatter on the sidewalk because I kept forgetting about those perforated pockets.

Finally, holes started appearing in my body. At first, I figured they were burns. But some holes grew deeper and wider. They became craters several inches wide, oozing pinkish slime.

(NOTE: This is a cartoon version of my actual condition. But it’s still pretty gross. Sorry about that.)

Now, an addict doesn’t typically show up at a hospital, unless they’ve been shot or stabbed. Even then, a stiff dose of crack could probably convince them to bleed out on the couch.

So you might imagine the kind of pain that finally led me to the emergency room, jittery and high, in the dead of night.

It would be morning before a doctor saw me. He was so taken aback by my craters, he called in other doctors, even sending a picture to his wife, who was a dermatologist.

Still, no one knew what to make of them.

“Have you done any drugs in the last 24 hours?” he asked.

Well, there was was the crack, meth, down, mushrooms, MDMA.

“Nope.” I replied, stealthily pulling down my sleeve.

“You’re a healthy guy, right?” he asked.

“Well, yeah…”

"Sleeping in clean environments?”

Crack dens, stairwells, car…

“Yes. Of course.”

One of these medical luminaries suggested it was a flesh-eating disease. It made perfect sense to me.

They released me around noon, freshly bandaged, with prescriptions I wouldn’t fill and follow-up appointments I wouldn’t attend.

Instead, I smoked my medication of choice and passed out with my blood-encrusted pants on.

But craters were cropping up everywhere, consuming what was left of me. I was fading into the sludge of forsaken humanity.

Until, at last, I materialized at my mother's door. She probably thought I was a ghost too.

She got right to work, plugging the holes with medicines and ointments and potions. Soon, I stopped leaking. The scars are still there. Doctors still aren’t sure what had plagued me. It feels good though, to inhabit a body again.

Lucky me. Many of us disappear completely.

Do you want to know how my recovery’s really going? Take my hand. Feel that? The fingertips are baby faces, pink and soft.

Like they’ve been born again.