Rushing around early in the morning was becoming a habit for her. She was late for school yet again, and she had already gotten an ear full from her mother. Her first sign that something was wrong was when Josh, her father’s friend, showed up instead of him. She was confused, but she went with it. The ride to school was agonizingly long, and unusually silent, as Josh stared blankly at the road coming towards them. She looked out the passenger window, but the stark silence was eating her alive. She finally built up the courage to ask what was wrong. The nervous stare that followed her question was just enough to send her into tears.

Her life before this had been easy. She was young, happy, and fearless. She was an outgoing little girl and she had a tendency of making people smile. She was a “Daddy’s Girl” in almost every way possible. Her life was in her father’s hands. He was always there for her. He never missed important things. He never let anything, or anyone hurt her. When she was a baby, she would sleep on his chest. As she got older, she kept that trait. When she got bigger, she would simply lay her head on his chest. Listening to his heart beating so calmly in his chest like the steady beat of drums in a delicate piece of music was so soothing to her. When she was four her mother and father separated, and she started to only see him every other weekend. Her father wasn’t well. He was normally sick, or sleeping, or tired and cranky when she saw him. A lot of the time when she and her sister were visiting he would be laying down. Sometimes people they didn’t know would come over and hang out for a while. She and her sister were never allowed in his room when people came over, and the door was always locked. Her dad would always go outside on the phone for hours and they were never allowed to go outside with him. He told them “it’s business babygirl, you wouldn’t understand.” They never thought too much of the strangers and the long calls; daddy had always been that way.

Sometimes when they were young her sister, Marissa and her dad and herself would go on great adventures. They went to Disney and they went to Cinderella’s castle! It was beautiful, and Cinderella told the girls that they were the most beautiful angels in the world. She was ecstatic. Dad brought them to New York too. They went to see where the Twin Towers used to be. They saw the statue of Liberty, and they walked miles and miles of city lights in the cold. The walk seemed like five minutes simply because of the overpowering beauty and the gorgeous horizon lines. On the way back to the car, they realized that they didn’t exactly know where the car was, or where they were. Walking around looking was about an hour but eventually they remembered. The car was there and safe, and amazingly warm on their cold, crystallized skin. The GPS was broken though, and no one knew what happened. Great, they were lost in New York city, in the winter, in the freezing cold, and to top it off they were almost out of gas.

It wasn’t all that bad for them though. They figured out the twists and turns and unknown directions to get out of the beautiful wonderland. The ride home was long, boring, and filled with sleepy silence. She lay in the back with her body wrapped tightly in blankets, with the warmth trapped within her new cocoon. The car glided down the highway with effortless grace. Suddenly, fear sent shock waves through the car as it flew through the air, accelerating more and more until it came to a sharp and sudden stop. It took a moment for them to realize what exactly had happened. They got out, into a pond, and dragged their tired bodies to the side of the road.

Cold, tired, hurt, and irritable they stood until the police showed themselves to the scene of the crash. They were escorted to a hotel where they ate a complimentary breakfast. They took a taxi back home. The anger that filled their mother’s deep blue eyes was not hidden, nor forgiving in any way. Their mother couldn’t for her life figure out what kept this man so calm when he had just so recently almost killed them all. Little did they know that his soul wasn’t here, and he was merely a cold, empty shell of the man that he used to be.

May 11, 2011. The day her world came crashing down. She woke up late, yet again. Rushing around early in the morning was becoming a habit for her. She had already gotten an ear full from her mother. Her first sign that something was wrong was when Josh, her father’s friend, showed up instead of him. She was confused, but she went with it. The ride to school was agonizingly long, and unusually silent, as Josh stared blankly at the road coming towards them. She looked out the passenger window, but the stark silence was eating her alive. She finally built up the courage to ask what was wrong. The nervous stare that followed her question was just enough to send her into tears. “He’s in the hospital,” he said, “he had a heart attack last night.” Silence. Pure devastation. The tears fell down her cheeks like rain from a stormy sky.

She got out of the truck, and she stood with her feet frozen against the pavement. She had never, ever felt so broken, helpless, and small in her life. She dragged her distraught and disembodied mind up the front stairs into the main building of her high school. She went in and signed in late, and watched one single tear drop onto the sheet. One tear was all it took to send her spiraling down into an ocean of tears. The secretary looked up at her crying eyes and didn’t know how to react at first. She jumped to her feet and hurried out into the lobby to pull her into comforting arms. She brought the young freshman into the office and into a back room where she was spoken to by Dr. Lawrence. She had a gentle voice, soft and comforting, kind and omniscient. She was a brilliant woman, and relatable too. She spoke to the young girl about what was wrong. She offered a warm embrace once the tears were calmed, and a mirror to fix the girl’s mascara streaked face.

From that day on her life was never the same.

Her initial realization that something wasn’t right pulled her mind to a world where nothing made sense. The idea had been running through her head, but she never wanted to accept the harsh reality that her father was addicted. Addicted to the high, addicted to the pain, the struggle, the attention, the drugs. It was the first time she was wholly broken in her life. She was young, only 14, which was hard enough as it was. She was struggling in school. Freshman year was proving to be the worst. The girls were getting meaner and meaner, and she was still considered the new girl. She went home and cried almost daily; the bullying was worse than ever before. She had finally hit her breaking point.

She spiraled into a deep depression, sleeping, avoiding everything, self injury and a mental hospital. She was hurt, betrayed to say the very least. And she was confused. How could her own father, the man she looked up to her whole childhood, her rock, her sunlight in the pouring rain, the only person she trusted fully, be the one who hurt her most? She felt like she was nothing, like she was a speck of dust on the face of society. She felt small, breakable, vulnerable, hopeless. She felt as if death might be the better option in her life. She cried in her bed, curled in her blankets, holding them close to her as if they were all she had. Tears rolled softly down her cheeks and fell to the pillow as she thought about where things went wrong. To her it seemed like everything she did in effort to fix things, would blow up in her face. All she could do then was watch as the ashes and embers of another life fell to the floor and burnt out.

The summer of that year was the worst. Carrying out a normal life was proving impossible to her. Hospitalization after hospitalization, her father’s health was deteriorating quickly in her eyes, and the reasoning for this degenerating health was his addiction. However the people who seemed closest to him were the people who were most in the dark. The reality was that her father, her life, her solid point, her rock, her daddy, was crumbling to the ground like a sand castle that had been trampled in a game of beach volleyball. They didn’t know he had a problem. They didn’t know he was struggling. They didn’t know that he couldn’t physically go a day without drugging himself to numbness. He was brought to the hospital again, and that day was the day that her world shattered to pieces. Mike, a close friend of her fathers was visiting in the hospital. He was asked to go to her fathers home and take care of the two cats. When Mike walked into the house it was like a scene from a movie. Vials scattered all over the floor. Crack pipes and bath salts were hidden in holes that had been punched in the walls. White lines of cocaine lay out on the counter with a small piece of straw laying next to them. Pill bottle after pill bottle open and empty. Strangers in the back room shooting up heroin while his family knew nothing of it. Mike went back to the hospital and ran through the vacant halls to her father’s hospital bed where he lay asleep, drugged to numbness as he was used to. Mike picked up his pants and went into the bathroom and he found the one single thing that he wanted to never see: a vial. Bath salts. Even lying in his hospital bed her father was doing the drugs that put him there in the first place.

She was told about officially her father’s problem about a week after they saw him in the hospital. Everything she never wanted to believe about her father and the drugs was the cold, hard truth. Everything made sense. The strangers that came into the house, the locked doors, the long phone calls. Everything. She was emotionally destroyed. She stopped talking to her father, no phone calls, no contact. She couldn’t handle it. Her father lost his babygirl. She was gone, and she was never coming back. Years later she still hasn’t seen him. She still struggles with the pain sometimes. One wish she would do anything to have come true is the wish that her father would come back. All she wants is her daddy to come back to her and be normal again. She wants the good times to be back; she wants her father to be her father. She wants his support and his love. But her father is gone, and he is nothing but a shell of himself. All because of his addiction to the white lines.