The Long Way Back: One Man’s Journey Through Fentanyl Withdrawal and the Recovery That Followed

A raw, honest look at fentanyl withdrawal, the struggle to find addiction treatment, and what recovery actually looks like—one day at a time.

The Long Way Back

Part One: The Crisis

The morning everything ended—or began, depending on how you count—it was already eighty degrees by nine and the air conditioner in my truck had been blowing hot for three weeks. I’m not sayin’ I was gonna get it fixed. I was sayin’ I was gonna get it fixed. Same way I was sayin’ I was gonna do a lot of things. The truck made it to the parking lot of the hospital though, which is somethin’.

St. Mary’s ain’t a big hospital. It’s the one on Route 7, the one where my ma had her knee done five years back, where my cousin Trey was born, where I once came in with a broken nose from a construction accident—hit my face on a two-by-four when the scaffolding slipped, blood everywhere, I thought I was gonna die right there in the middle of a job site in front of everybody. I sat in the parking lot for twenty minutes before I went in. I was shakin’, not bad yet but gettin’ there, and I could feel the sweat runnin’ down my back even though the cab was hot and I wasn’t even out in it yet.

The thing about bein’ dope sick is you can’t really sit still. But the thing about walkin’ into a place and askin’ for help when you’ve been lyin’ to everyone for two years straight is that your legs don’t want to work neither. I sat there and I looked at the hospital and I thought about all the times I’d driven past this place in the past two years, all the times I’d told myself I’d come in and get help and then just… didn’t. The thing is, you can’t think about it too much or you won’t do it. You gotta just do it before your brain catches up and starts comin’ up with reasons not to.

I got out of the truck. The heat hit me like a wall, that thick August humidity that makes you feel like you’re breathin’ through a wet towel. My shirt was already stickin’ to my back from sittin’ in that hot cab. I walked across the parking lot and the gravel crunched under my boots—my good boots, the ones I wore to job sites, the ones with the steel toes worn down at the heels from years of walkin’ on concrete. I didn’t have work to go to. I hadn’t had work in three weeks. But I put those boots on anyway because puttin’ on work boots was part of bein’ a person, part of keepin’ up appearances, part of pretendin’ I still had my shit together.

The automatic doors slid open and that hospital smell hit me—disinfectant and anxiety and body odor from someone who’d been waitin’ too long, plus that particular stillness that exists in places where people are tryin’ not to exist. There was a woman at the intake desk, maybe fifty, with readin’ glasses pushed up on her head and a phone pressed to her ear. She held up one finger like she’d be right with me, and I stood there tryin’ not to shake, tryin’ to look like a person who belonged there and not like I was about to walk up and say, hey, I’ve been takin’ oxys for three years and now I’m on fentanyl and I can’t stop and I don’t know what to do.

I been a good liar my whole life. That’s what people don’t tell you about addiction—it’s not just about the drugs. It’s about the lyin’. The maintainin’. The coverin’ up. I could look people in the eye and tell ’em anythin’ and they’d believe me. My mama used to say I could sell ice to an eskimo, which was her way of sayin’ I was smooth, I was charmin’, I could talk my way out of anythin’. It was a gift, back before it became the thing that almost killed me.

“I need to speak with someone about—” I said when she hung up. My voice came out weird, too high. I cleared my throat. Tried again. “About addiction services. I think. I mean, I know. I know I need help.”

She looked at me the way people look at you when they’re tryin’ to figure out what category you fall into. I’d gotten real good at readin’ that look over the past couple years. The thing is, I don’t look like what people picture when they picture an addict. I’m six-foot-one, I work out, I keep my hair cut short, I was wearin’ a polo shirt—the blue one with the little logo on the chest that my sister bought me for Christmas two years ago, the one that still fits even though I’ve lost fifteen pounds since then. I’ve sat in emergency rooms next to people who looked more stereotypical than me and I’ve watched the nurses treat ’em different, and I’ve been grateful in this sick way that I can pass as normal when I absolutely am not.

“Addiction services,” she repeated, and her voice changed, got careful. Like she was talkin’ to someone who might break. “Are you lookin’ for treatment for yourself?”

“Yeah. Yeah, for me.”

She handed me a clipboard with about fifteen pages of forms. There were questions about my drug history, my insurance, my employment, my mental health, my legal history. Every question felt like an accusation. Have you ever been convicted of a crime? Well, I got a DUI two years back, which I didn’t tell my insurance company about, which is probably fraud, another thing to add to the list. Do you have thoughts of harming yourself? Do you have thoughts of harming others? The honest answer to the first one is sometimes, but not in the way they mean. I don’t want to kill myself but I don’t exactly want to be here neither, which is a distinction that probably matters to someone but I’m not sure who.

I filled out the forms in the waitin’ room, which had four other people in it—a young girl who couldn’t have been more than twenty, an old man who was asleep in a chair, a woman clutchin’ a tote bag like it contained everythin’ she owned. We didn’t look at each other. That’s the thing about waitin’ rooms for this stuff. everyone’s tryin’ not to be seen, tryin’ not to acknowledge that they’re sittin’ in the addiction services waitin’ room like it’s some kind of admission. The chairs were those plastic ones that stick to your legs when you stand up, and the light was that particular fluorescent hum that makes everythin’ feel worse. There was a water cooler in the corner with a sign sayin’ DRINKING WATER and the cup dispenser was empty.

A nurse came out and called my name—Marcus, like I was some kinda criminal bein’ picked up by the cops—and I followed her down another hallway, past a water cooler with a sign sayin’ DRINKING WATER (the same one, I’m pretty sure, maybe they only got one), past framed photos of the hospital’s foundin’ in 1952, past a vending machine that hummed in the corner. The hallway had that particular hospital aesthetic—pale green walls, faded from years of fluorescent lightin’, scuff marks on the floor where beds had been wheeled through, motivational posters about teamwork that nobody had looked at in probably a decade.

She took me into a small room with two chairs and a box of tissues on the table and closed the door. The chair was hard plastic, the kind they got in schools, and there was a crack in one of the arms where someone had sat on it too hard or dropped somethin’. I sat on the undamaged one.

“So,” she said, lookin’ at her clipboard. “Marcus. Twenty-eight. You said you’re strugglin’ with opioid use?”

And that’s when I finally said it out loud to someone who wasn’t my dealer, someone who wasn’t another user, someone who wasn’t me tryin’ to convince myself in the bathroom mirror at 4 AM that this was fine, this was under control, I could stop whenever I wanted. I’d said it to myself a million times. I’d even said it to my sister once, drunk, cryin’, promisin’ I’d get help and then not followin’ through. But I’d never said it to a stranger, someone who had no reason to believe me, someone whose job it was to help me if I was tellin’ the truth.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m strugglin’. I’ve been strugglin’ for a while now.”

And somethin’ happened when I said that. Some kinda wall came down. I wasn’t maintainin’ anymore. I wasn’t performin’. I was just… present. In a hard plastic chair in a tiny room with a box of tissues, and I was tellin’ the truth.

“I didn’t mean for it to happen,” I said, and my voice cracked. “I really didn’t. It just—happened. One thing led to another. And now I can’t—” I stopped. Swallowed. “Now I can’t stop.”

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Part Two: The Story

She didn’t say anythin’ right away. Just nodded. That professional nod that means they’re listenin’, they’re hearin’ you, but they gotta process what you’re sayin’ before they respond. I stared at the crack in the arm of the other chair and waited for her to tell me what a mess I was, how I’d done this to myself, how people like me were the reason healthcare costs were so high and wait times were so long.

But she didn’t say that.

“I’m Denise,” she said. “I’m a counselor here. Can you tell me more about what you’re experiencin’? When did it start for you?”

And I tried to start at the beginnin’ but I didn’t know where the beginnin’ was no more. Was it the hydrocodone they gave me after I tore my rotator cuff on a construction job? That was in 2021, three years ago. I was workin’ for a company called Hartwell Builders, out on Route 22, puttin’ up steel beams for what was gonna be a strip mall that never got finished because the developer ran out of money. My shoulder caught on a beam and just—went. I felt it pop and then I felt nothin’ and then I felt everythin’ all at once.

They gave me sixty hydrocodone at the hospital. Sixty pills. I took ’em for three days like they said and then I still hurt and the doctor wouldn’t give me more so I asked around. That’s the thing about construction sites—someone always knows someone. A guy named Danny had a cousin who’d had surgery and didn’t take all his pills and Danny said he’d ask. Two weeks later I was buyin’ from Danny himself, who markup’d them thirty bucks a bottle but it was easier than findin’ my own connection.

The oxycodone came next. I don’t even remember how. Just that hydrocodone wasn’t workin’ no more and oxycodone was stronger and it was easy to find, easier than you’d think. You could get ’em from guys at work, from guys at the gym, from a guy who ran a car wash down by the old textile plant. The car wash closed in 2008 but the guy still had the buildin’ and he’d converted the back office into somethin’ else. I found out about him from a guy I was buyin’ from who said this other guy had better stuff for less money.

“I started with pain pills,” I told Denise. “Legit ones. From a doctor. After I hurt my shoulder on the job.”

She nodded.

“And then it just—escalated. You know how it is. You take ’em and they work and then they don’t work as good so you take more and then the doctor won’t prescribe anymore so you gotta find ’em somewhere else. And somewhere else leads to somewhere else leads to—” I shrugged. “Leads to here.”

“How long has it been since you had legitimate prescription?”

“I don’t know. A year? Maybe more.” I tried to remember. The last time I had a real prescription was after my dad died, somethin’ like that. Two years ago, maybe more. Time gets weird when you’re usin’. Days blur together. “I been buyin’ off the street for a while now.”

“What are you using now?”

And this was the part I didn’t wanna say. But I said it anyway.

“Fentanyl. It’s—it’s what’s out there. What’s easy to get. The oxys got too expensive and then they started cuttin’ ’em with all kinds of shit and then heroin came back and now it’s mostly fentanyl, ’cause it’s cheaper and stronger. You never know what you’re gettin’.”

“How much do you use?”

I told her. I told her how much I spent, how often I used, how I’d lost my job at the construction company—not the one where I hurt my shoulder, a different one, the one where they found out about the DUI and let me go, or maybe they found out about somethin’ else, it’s all blurry now. I told her about the money, how I’d blown through my savings, how I’d borrowed from my sister, how I’d pawned my daddy’s watch—his Hamilton, the one he wore every day for thirty years, the one he gave me when I turned eighteen—for two hundred bucks that lasted three days.

“That’s a common story,” Denise said, and I couldn’t tell if that was supposed to be comfortin’ or not. “You’re not alone in this, Marcus. What we’re goin’ to talk about today is what options you have.”

She explained about medication-assisted treatment—buprenorphine, methadone, naltrexone. She explained about inpatient versus outpatient. She explained about the difference between detox and rehab and therapy and all these words I knew but didn’t really understand. I sat there noddin’ like I was followin’ along, but mostly I was thinkin’ about how much longer I could go before the withdrawal got really bad, because I could feel it startin’ now, this antsy feelin’ in my legs, this ache in my lower back, this fog startin’ to creep into my brain.

“There’s a program at the community health center,” Denise said. “They take most insurances, and they have a slidin’ scale if you don’t have coverage. I can get you a referral today, but you’ll need to call ’em yourself to set up an appointment. They might have a waitlist.”

“How long?”

“It varies. Could be a few days, could be a few weeks.”

I thought about the money in my account, which was eight dollars. I thought about the truck outside, which was three payments behind and probably gettin’ repossessed soon. I thought about my apartment, which I hadn’t paid rent on in two months and my landlord had started leavin’ notes on my door. I thought about my sister, who’d I’d borrowed $400 from three weeks ago and hadn’t paid back, who’d I’d borrowed money from so many times that she probably didn’t pick up when she saw my name no more.

“What about now?” I asked. “Like, right now. What do I do today?”

Denise looked at me with somethin’ that might have been compassion or might have been the look you give someone who’s askin’ a question you can’t answer. “Today? Today you go home. You call the number I’m goin’ to give you. You take care of yourself as much as you can until you can get in to see someone. I know that’s not what you want to hear.”

It wasn’t. I wanted her to fix it. I wanted her to say, come with me right now, we’ll get you into a program today, you’ll be clean by the end of the week, everythin’ will be fine. But that’s not how it works. That’s not how any of this works. You can’t undo three years of damage in one afternoon. You can’t rewire your brain just because you finally decided you wanted to.

She gave me a card with a phone number on it. Community Health Center, Behavioral Health Department. She wrote down the name of a doctor there, Dr. Amari. She told me to ask for her specifically if I could, that she was good with opioid cases. She gave me another card with the SAMHSA National Helpline on it—1-800-662-4357—and told me I could call that number anytime, 24/7, if I needed to talk to someone or find resources.

I put the cards in my pocket. They felt like paper weights, like promises I couldn’t keep.

“One more thing,” Denise said. “Have you thought about what happens if you can’t make it to Tuesday? If the withdrawal gets too bad?”

“I been through it before,” I said. “I’ll be okay.”

She looked at me for a long moment. Like she was decidin’ whether to believe me or not.

“I hope so,” she said. “But if you can’t—if it’s gettin’ too hard—there are options. The ER can help with acute withdrawal. There are detox facilities that might have beds. You don’t have to go through this alone.”

I nodded and I stood up and I walked out to my truck, which was still in the parking lot, which still had a broken air conditioner, which was still three payments behind. And I sat there for a while, shakin’ a little more now, sweatin’ through my polo shirt—the one my sister bought me, the one that probably didn’t fit her budget but she got it anyway because that’s the kind of person she is—and I pulled out my phone and I called the number on the card.

The phone rang six times and then a machine picked up. Please hold, your call is important to us, please continue to hold. I held for eleven minutes before someone came on the line, a woman with a nice voice who asked me what I was callin’ about and when I told her she transferred me to someone else, who asked me the same questions, who told me Dr. Amari had openings next Tuesday, which was six days away.

“Six days,” I said. “I don’t know if I can—” I didn’t finish the sentence. I didn’t know if I could make it six days without usin’. I didn’t know if I could make it six hours.

“The clinic does have a crisis line,” the woman said. “If you’re in acute distress, you can call that number and they’ll talk to you. But for an appointment with Dr. Amari, Tuesday’s the earliest.”

I wrote down the crisis line number anyway. I wrote down the address—184 Industrial Park Road, Suite 207. I wrote down that I should bring my insurance card if I had one, which I did, from my old job, which I’d been payin’ COBRA on until three months ago when I couldn’t afford the $400 monthly premium no more, so technically I didn’t have insurance anymore even though I had a card in my wallet that said I did.

I drove home. Or I tried to drive home. I made it about halfway before I had to pull over at a gas station because I was shakin’ too bad to hold the wheel steady. The exit was the one by the old Burger King that closed in 2019. The parking lot was half gravel, half asphalt, and there was only one other car—a minivan with Alabama plates and a roof rack full of luggage. The gas station was one of those small ones that sells cigarettes and beef jerky and motor oil and not much else. The sign out front said SPEEDWAY but someone had painted over the S so it said PEEWAY and nobody had fixed it.

I sat in the parkin’ lot and I called my sister.

“Hey,” she said when she picked up. Just hey, but I could hear the wariness in it. The last time I’d called her I’d been tryin’ to borrow money. The time before that I’d asked her to pick me up from somewhere, some town I won’t name, where I’d run out of gas and was too sick to drive.

“I need help,” I said. “I’m callin’ around. I’m tryin’ to get into a program.”

Silence on the other end. Long enough that I thought she’d hung up.

“You said that before,” she finally said. “You said you were goin’ to get help and then you didn’t.”

“I know. I know I did. But this time—” I stopped. What was different this time? I didn’t have an answer. I was callin’ from a gas station parkin’ lot in withdrawal, and I had eight dollars to my name, and I was six days away from an appointment that might or might not lead to actual treatment, and I couldn’t promise anythin’ because promisin’ things I couldn’t deliver on was what I did, it was part of the disease or whatever they call it.

“I’m serious,” I said. “I’m really serious this time.”

“I want to believe you,” she said. “I really do, Marcus. But I’ve believed you before. And every time—” Her voice cracked a little. “Every time you disappear for a few days and come back like nothin’ happened. And I keep hopin’ this is the time it sticks, and it’s not. It’s never the time it sticks.”

I sat there in the truck and I listened to my sister tell me about all the times I’d let her down, and she was right. Every word was right. I couldn’t argue with any of it because I’d done every single thing she said I’d done. I’d borrowed money I never paid back. I’d promised to show up and didn’t. I’d lied about where I was, what I was doin’, how much I’d used. I’d stolen cash from her purse once, when I was really bad, and she’d never mentioned it but I knew she knew and we both pretended she didn’t.

The theft—that was the worst. That was the thing I couldn’t take back. She’d had seventy dollars in that purse, money she’d saved from her paychecks for groceries, and I’d took it when I was supposed to be watchin’ her kids while she worked a double shift. I’d taken it and gone and bought a bundle and come back three hours later higher than I’d been in weeks and she’d looked at me with this expression that wasn’t even anger, just… disappointment. Like she’d expected better but she’d also expected this, somehow.

“I’m not askin’ you to trust me,” I said. “I’m askin’ you to help me not die. Can you do that? Can you just help me not die?”

Another silence. Then: “What do you need?”

“I need someone to sit with me for the next few days. I got an appointment on Tuesday. I just need someone to make sure I don’t—” I couldn’t say it. I couldn’t say the word overdose out loud to my sister. “Make sure I’m okay until Tuesday.”

“I can’t do that,” she said. “You know I can’t do that. I got the kids, I got work, I can’t—”

“Then just—can you come get me? I’m at the Shell on Route 7. Can you just come get me and take me to your house? I don’t have to stay, just help me get there?”

She came. She came and she didn’t say much, just got in the passenger seat and looked at me with this expression that was worse than anger, that was just exhaustion. Like she was tired of feelin’ anythin’ about me. We drove to her house in silence and she put me in the guest room and she told me she’d be back in a few hours, she had to pick up the kids from school, and if I needed anythin’ there was the number for the crisis line on the counter.

The guest room had a single bed with a blue comforter and a nightstand with a lamp that didn’t work. The walls were painted this off-white color and there was a framed print of a sailboat on the water, the kind of thing you get at a department store for $19.99. I sat on the edge of the bed and I waited for my sister to leave and then I lay down and I tried not to think about how much I needed to use.

The withdrawal got bad that night. It always does, worse at night, worse when you’re alone with nothin’ to distract you. My legs wouldn’t stop movin’, this restless energy that had nowhere to go. I was hot and then I was cold and then I was hot again. I threw up three times—in the guest room bathroom, which had this pink tile floor and a shower curtain with little ducks on it, my niece’s bathroom when she was stayin’ over—and I cried, which I haven’t done in years, just laid on the floor of my sister’s guest room and cried because it hurt so bad and because I was so ashamed of myself, because my sister had to take time off work to watch me because I couldn’t even take care of myself, because I was thirty years old and this was what my life had become.

I called the crisis line at 3 AM. A man answered, soundin’ awake, like this was his job, which it was.

“I’m in withdrawal,” I said. “I can’t—I don’t know if I can make it to my appointment on Tuesday.”

“Have you thought about goin’ to the emergency room?”

“I was there today. They gave me a referral.”

“I understand. The ER can help with acute withdrawal symptoms. They might be able to connect you with a program that has space sooner.”

I didn’t want to go back to the ER. I didn’t want to sit in another waitin’ room, fill out another fifteen pages of forms, tell another stranger my whole story. But I didn’t want to die neither, and right now dyin’ felt like a real possibility.

The ER was different at night. Quieter, somehow, even though there were still people everywhere. A kid in the waitin’ room with his arm in a sling, an old woman coughin’ into a tissue, a man who kept pacin’ back and forth like he couldn’t sit still. I gave ’em my name and my insurance card that wasn’t really valid no more and I sat down and I waited.

They took me back after two hours. A young doctor, couldn’t have been much older than me, with kind eyes and a voice that didn’t sound like it was recitin’ from a script.

“Withdrawal from opioids,” he said. “How long has this been goin’ on?”

“Two days. I’m tryin’ to get into a program. I have an appointment on Tuesday.”

“Tuesday’s four days away. That’s a long time to be in withdrawal.” He looked at his notes. “I can give you somethin’ to help with the symptoms—clonidine for the restlessness, loperamide for the diarrhea, somethin’ to help you sleep. But the safest place for you right now is a detox facility. Do you know if any have beds?”

I shook my head.

He made some calls. He was gone for twenty minutes and when he came back he had a printout with three phone numbers on it.

“There’s a facility about forty minutes from here,” he said. “They got a bed available. They take Medicaid, and they got a financial counselor who can help you sort out the insurance part. I can call you a cab if you want to go tonight.”

I didn’t want to go. I wanted to go home, to my apartment with its unpaid rent and its empty refrigerator and its silence. I wanted to pretend that this wasn’t happenin’, that I wasn’t sittin’ in an ER at 5 AM tryin’ to get into a detox facility because I couldn’t stop doin’ drugs on my own.

But I didn’t go home. I called the cab. I gave my sister’s address as the destination because I didn’t have anywhere else to give. And I sat in the back of a stranger’s car at 5:30 in the mornin’, watchin’ the sun come up over the hills of a county that had been gutted by the same forces that had gutted me—the factory closings, the job losses, the sense that the world had moved on without us—and I didn’t know what was goin’ to happen but I knew I couldn’t keep goin’ the way I’d been goin’.

The cab driver was a woman named Patricia who’d been drivin’ for a ride-share company for six years. She didn’t ask me questions. She just drove and I looked out the window at the familiar landscape—McDonald’s, closed; gas station, open; church, open for early mass—and I thought about all the times I’d driven this same route to get to my dealer, all the times I’d sat in the back of cars goin’ to places I didn’t want to go, and how this time was different, how this time I was actually tryin’ to get better.

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Part Three: Hope Springs

The detox facility was called Hope Springs. It was a converted motel on the edge of town, the kind of place that used to be a truck stop before it became somethin’ else. The parking lot was mostly empty and the buildin’ was this weird peach color and there was a sign in the window that said WELCOME TO RECOVERY in letters that were peelin’ a little at the edges. The office was in what used to be the front desk, and the rooms were what used to be motel rooms, and the common area was what used to be the breakfast area, with the same laminated tables and the same plastic chairs and the same smell of industrial cleaner that motels have always smelled like.

They took my phone at the door. They gave me a checklist of what I could keep—sweatpants, t-shirts, sneakers, my toothbrush—and what I couldn’t—anythin’ with strings, anythin’ with metal, anythin’ I could use to hurt myself. They gave me a room with two beds and a roommate named Dave, who was fifty-three and had been comin’ to Hope Springs on and off for ten years.

“It’s not so bad,” he said, when I laid down on my bed and didn’t say anythin’ for an hour. “The food’s okay. The staff actually cares. And they don’t judge you here, which is nice.”

“I’ve never been in a place like this before,” I said.

“Most people haven’t. Most people think it won’t happen to ’em. And then it does.”

The first three days were the worst. I mean, I’d been in withdrawal before, but I’d always given up and used again before it got really bad. This time I couldn’t give up, not because I was stronger than before but because there was nowhere to go and no money to get there and no dealer who would deliver out this far. I was stuck in my own body for seventy-two hours while it screamed at me for the poison I’d been feedin’ it.

The staff at Hope Springs was good, though. They brought me water without me havin’ to ask. They checked on me every fifteen minutes that first day. They gave me the medications the ER doctor had prescribed and they didn’t make me feel like I was weak for needin’ them. One of the counselors, a woman named Pat who’d been in recovery for fifteen years, sat with me for an hour on the second day and just listened to me talk about my dad, who’d I’d never properly grieved, about my job that I lost, about my sister who I might have permanently damaged.

“Guilt is part of it,” she said. “But it’s not supposed to be the whole thing. You’re allowed to feel guilty for what you did, but you’re also allowed to forgive yourself for bein’ sick. That’s the thing about this disease—it makes you do things you’d never do if you were well. Doesn’t make ’em okay, but it makes ’em… different. Understandable, maybe.”

“I stole from my sister,” I said. “I stole cash out of her purse.”

“I know. And you’ll probably have to make that right someday. But you can’t make anythin’ right if you’re dead. Right now, your job is to get well.”

After detox came the real work. Hope Springs had a program—group therapy twice a day, individual therapy once a week, a class on copin’ skills and another on relapse prevention. I met other people in various stages of recovery: a retired teacher named Carol who’d been sober for two years before a surgery re-triggered her addiction, a nineteen-year-old named Jake whose girlfriend had OD’d and whose grief had sent him spiralin’, a guy named Ray who’d been in and out of treatment for twenty years and was honest enough to say he didn’t know if this time would stick.

There were setbacks. Of course there were setbacks. A guy I was supposed to connect with got kicked out for usin’ in the bathroom, and I spent a week wonderin’ if that was gonna be me. I had a cravin’ so bad I actually walked to the parkin’ lot and looked at my phone, thinkin’ about callin’ an old number, before Pat found me and talked me back inside. I called my sister and she didn’t answer, which was fair, and I left a voicemail that I didn’t know if she’d ever listen to.

The program lasted twenty-eight days. Twenty-eight days of learnin’ how to live without drugs, how to handle stress without escapin’, how to be in my own skin without wantin’ to crawl out of it. On the last day, I sat with Dr. Amari, the psychiatrist at the community health center, and we talked about medication. She prescribed me buprenorphine, which I’d never heard of before Denise mentioned it, which reduces cravin’s and blocks the effects of other opioids, which means if I use I won’t feel it, which is a kind of freedom I didn’t know existed.

“Now comes the hard part,” Dr. Amari said. “Maintinin’ recovery. It’s not like you finish a program and you’re done. It’s somethin’ you work on every single day.”

“I know,” I said. “I’m tryin’ to be okay with that.”

“That’s the right attitude. You’re not broken, Marcus. You’re not fixed. You’re in recovery, which is a different thing entirely.”

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Part Four: The Long Way Back

I moved out of my sister’s guest room and into a halfway house, because I couldn’t afford an apartment on my own and I didn’t have anywhere else to go. The halfway house was in a neighborhood I’d never been to, on a street that had seen better days, in a house that smelled like bleach and coffee and the particular exhaustion of people tryin’ to rebuild their lives. I shared a room with a guy named Mike who was forty-one and worked at a warehouse and had been sober for three years and was happy to tell me about every mistake he’d made so I wouldn’t have to make the same ones.

I got a job at a grocery store. It wasn’t the construction work I’d done before, it wasn’t the career I’d imagined when I was twenty-two and thought I had everythin’ figured out. I stacked shelves and worked the night shift and made $14.50 an hour, which is more than I had when I was spendin’ $100 a day on drugs, but not by as much as you’d think once you factor in that I was payin’ $200 a week to live in the halfway house and another $50 for my medication and another $80 for the therapy I still go to once a week.

I called my sister every Sunday. It took her four weeks to start pickin’ up. It took another two months before she agreed to meet me for coffee. We sat at a diner neither of us had been to before—a place called The Busy Bee on Main Street, the one with the neon sign that’s been broken for years so it just says BUSY EE—and we didn’t talk about the past, not really. We talked about her kids, about my job, about nothin’ in particular, and at the end she reached across the table and squeezed my hand and I could feel her decidin’, moment by moment, whether to let me back in.

“I’m not sayin’ I’m not still angry,” she said. “I am. I’m angry about all the times you lied to me. I’m angry about the money. I’m angry about how scared you made me. But—” She stopped, and I could see her choosin’ her words carefully. “But I don’t want you to die. So I guess we’re doin’ this. I guess we’re tryin’.”

We’re still tryin’. That’s what recovery is, it turns out. It’s tryin’, over and over, with varyin’ degrees of success. I’ve been sober for seven months now, which is the longest I’ve been sober since I was twenty-five. I still go to group therapy every week. I still take my medication every mornin’. I still call my sister every Sunday. I still live in the halfway house, though I’m savin’ up to move into my own place, somethin’ small, somethin’ I can afford on what I make at the grocery store.

I still think about usin’. That’s the thing nobody tells you—that the cravin’s don’t go away, not really. They get quieter, they get less frequent, but they’re always there, this whisper in the back of my head that says, you know what would fix this? You know what would make everythin’ feel better? I know better than to listen to it now, most days. But some days I gotta work harder at not listenin’, some days I gotta call my sponsor or go to an extra meetin’ or just sit with the feelin’ until it passes.

The truck got repossessed three months into recovery. I saw it one day, this blue Ford I’d had since I was twenty-three, gettin’ loaded onto a tow truck from the parkin’ lot of my old apartment complex. I stood on the sidewalk and watched it go and I didn’t cry, which felt like growth, or maybe just numbness, I’m not sure which.

My credit is shot. It might be shot for years. The medical bills from the ER, from the detox, from the therapy—all of it went to collections, all of it showin’ up on my credit report when I looked, which I did once and won’t do again ’cause what’s the point? I’ll pay it back eventually, the same way I’ll pay back my sister eventually, the same way I’m tryin’ to pay back everyone I owe. One day at a time, which sounds like a cliché until it’s the only thing that keeps you goin’.

I go to Narcotics Anonymous meetin’s in a church basement on Tuesday nights. The same people are there most weeks—Pat from Hope Springs, Dave my old roommate, a rotatin’ cast of new people and old-timers and everyone in between. We sit in foldin’ chairs in a circle and we share and we listen and we remind each other that we’re not alone, that this is possible, that we can do this even when it feels impossible.

The meetin’ starts at 7:30. There’s a coffee pot in the back with that particular burnt taste that church basement coffee always has, and there’s always donuts or bagels that someone brought, and there’s always the same arguments about whether the meetin’ should be “open” or “closed” and whether newcomers should share and how long people should share for. There’s this guy named Gerald who’s been comin’ for fifteen years and always tells the same stories about his old using days, and there’s this young girl named Destiny who’s only twenty and already been to treatment four times, and there’s me, in the back row, listenin’ to all of them and recognizin’ myself in some of what they say and not recognizin’ myself in other parts.

Some days I believe that I’m actually doin’ this. Some days I believe that recovery is possible and I’m livin’ proof. Other days I wake up and the first thing I feel is this heavy weight on my chest, this sense that I’m one bad day away from losin’ everythin’, that I haven’t actually changed, that I’m just… pausin’. Between one disaster and the next.

That’s the truth that nobody wants to talk about. Recovery doesn’t make you a new person. It just makes you a person who’s not usin’. You still got all your old problems. You still got all your old patterns. You still got the same brain that told you for three years that what you were doin’ was fine, that you could stop whenever you wanted, that everythin’ was under control. The difference is now you got tools to fight back. But the fight never ends. That’s what they mean when they say it’s a daily thing. Every day you gotta choose again. Every day you gotta do the next right thing even when the wrong thing sounds easier.

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Part Five: The Resources

If you’re where I was—if you’re in your truck outside a hospital wonderin’ how you’re gonna make it through the next hour, if you’re in your sister’s guest room on the floor shakin’ so hard your teeth hurt, if you’re readin’ this at 3 AM ’cause you can’t sleep and you don’t know what else to do—here’s what helped me. It might help you too. It might not. But it exists, and it costs nothin’ to try.

SAMHSA National Helpline: 1-800-662-4357. This is the number Denise gave me, the number on the card. It’s free, confidential, 24/7. They can help you find treatment, talk to someone about what you’re goin’ through, connect you with resources in your area. I’ve called ’em twice—once at 3 AM when I thought I was gonna lose my mind, once when I was lookin’ for a new therapist after I moved. They actually answer. They actually help.

FindTreatment.gov: This is a website, findtreatment.gov, run by SAMHSA. You put in your zip code and it shows you treatment facilities near you—detox centers, inpatient programs, outpatient programs, medication-assisted treatment providers. It tells you what insurance they take, what types of treatment they offer, whether they got beds available. It’s not fancy but it’s real, and it’s updated.

988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline: Call or text 988 if you’re in crisis. I called the crisis line from Hope Springs when things got bad. It’s not just for suicidal thoughts—it’s for any kind of crisis, includin’ addiction emergencies. They can talk you through a rough moment, help you find local resources, or connect you with someone who can help. It’s available 24/7, and it’s free.

Medication-Assisted Treatment: This is what saved my life. Buprenorphine, methadone, naltrexone—these are medications that reduce cravin’s and block the effects of opioids. They’re not tradin’ one addiction for another. They’re evidence-based treatment for a chronic medical condition. If you’re usin’ opioids and want to stop, ask about medication-assisted treatment. It changed everythin’ for me.

Community Health Centers: Federally qualified health centers provide care on a slidin’ scale based on income. If you don’t have insurance, if you can’t afford private treatment, they can help. The one I go to charges me $30 per visit ’cause that’s what I can afford. They’re not glamorous, but they’re real, and they exist in every community.

Narcotics Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous: These are free. They’re in every town, practically. They’re not for everyone—if twelve-step programs aren’t your thing, SMART Recovery is an alternative that uses a different approach. But there’s somethin’ powerful about sittin’ in a room with other people who understand what you’ve been through, who don’t judge you for bein’ sick, who can show you that recovery is possible.

Peer Support Specialists: These are people who’ve been in recovery themselves and are trained to help others navigate the system. They understand ’cause they’ve lived it. If your treatment program has peer support, use it. If not, ask about it. The National Practice Guidelines for Peer Supporters can help you find one.

Your Local Department of Social Services: This is the borin’ answer but it’s the true one. They can help with Medicaid enrollment, with housin’ assistance, with food stamps, with all the practical stuff that feels impossible when you’re in the middle of a crisis. It takes persistence—callin’, followin’ up, dealin’ with bureaucratic frustration—but they got resources.

I’m not gonna tell you this is easy. I’m not gonna tell you that if you just reach out, everythin’ will be fine. That’s not true. The system is frustratin’. The wait lists are long. The insurance companies fight you. Some days it feels like the whole world’s set up to keep you down.

But the other thing is true too. You can do hard things. You can make the call. You can sit in the waitin’ room. You can fill out the forms. You can go to the meetin’s. You can take the medication. You can keep tryin’ even when you fail.

I know ’cause I’m doin’ it. One day at a time. Same as you.

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Marcus is a composite character based on research into the lived experiences of young white American men navigatin’ opioid addiction. Names, locations, and identifyin’ details have been changed to protect privacy while maintainin’ authenticity. If you or someone you know is strugglin’ with addiction, please reach out to the resources listed above. Help is available. Recovery is possible. You are not alone.