The first time you go to rehab will be a shell shock.
The sun will feel unfamiliar, like the last bits of water to be sucked down the drain, you will beg for precipitation in a nurse's station while she tries to hit your worn-out veins. You will get to know the ones who tap your skin lightly like they remember you are someone's daughter, not just fallout on a lonely Wednesday.
After you join ranks, banded together by the same bullet in your veins, after you learn their deepest secrets, like why Emily still sleeps with the lights on, why Nixon's parents don't look at him the same.
After you become a company, the soldiers start to face the battle alone after thirty days.
The second time you go to rehab will be like the ringing in your ears that never quite goes away.
Different nurses poke and prod at the same tired veins. The same stiff blankets, the same stories from a different face, but you learn to love them all the same.
The whole room goes dead quiet when they tell you statistically only one of you will escape the hole in your vein.
The third time you go to rehab, the sun hides with shame. The drive becomes further and further, like home will somehow slip away. Like after thirty days your room will be rearranged. Like your photos will be taken off the wall, and no one will ask what college you dropped out of this year.
Sometimes at parties, your parents will avoid bringing up your name at all.
The fourth time you go to rehab, your friends will stop writing down their phone numbers for you to call. Your family stops answering as much.
Sometimes you just stare at the drawings from your cousins wishing good luck at the doctor and wonder if their lives will go a different way. You pray to God they never have to rewire their brain with a radioactive knife.
The fifth time you go to rehab you stop saying we'll be friends forever. You get tired of the phone numbers no longer being in service. You get tired of the funerals in their home states. You get tired of finding out years later they died the day after they walked out of the doors. You get tired of writing memorials on their Facebook page.
The sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth time you go to rehab you start to stop believing in an afterlife.
Hell is watching everyone move on with their lives and you are still watching yours being lowered further into the ground.
The crowd looking down grows thinner every time. Once you hit double digits, you truly believe in your heart you are going to die. Hopeless is the body, soul, and mind.
By the fifteenth time, the chemicals are begging for a Chernobyl of the mind.
By the fifteenth time, your veins are numb to the nurses with caramelized smiles, and cafeteria teeth.
By the fifteenth time when they ask what you are willing to do, you finally say, anything.
