Life Beyond The Beam

Every step away from one life is a step towards another.

🎧Pop your headphones on and I'll tell you this one myself

My head torch bounced across the garden as I planted trees at 10 p.m after another day of barrelling methamphetamine up my nose.

I couldn't have told you how long I'd been awake for. Addiction stops measuring time in days. Just later, after, tomorrow or when the next line is on the mirror.

The sun comes up. People go to work. Before you know it, it's dark again, and you're putting out a breakfast rail because, somehow, it's already the next day.

Writing this I can still taste the drip of it run down the back of my throat.

15 committed years in addiction. Methamphetamine, LSD, MDMA, whatever letters are in the drug alphabet, I've probably had a go. But Methamphetamine and weed were my constant companions everyday. I'd have rail because I was going to the supermarket, because I was waiting at a red light.

If I could go back and stand beside that woman in the garden at stupid-o’clock and tell her " Hey you, head lamp lady! One day you're going to reconnect with the love of your life, become a mother, Sunday mornings you'll be watching your son wave at miniature steam trains," I probably would have thought I had started hallucinating. I couldn't imagine that the woman planting palm trees in a head torch, high as a kite, and the woman waving at miniature steam trains with her little boy could ever be the same person.

I was in a long-term relationship with a woman who I didn't think I'd be with for longer than two nights. Two nights became 10 years. I had my routines, my friends, all in our little warped drug bubble. Our friends celebrated each other's wins and we carried each other through our darkest days. I wasn't searching for another life. I genuinely couldn't or didn't need to imagine it.

And then it all dropped.

Then one day I was putting washing away and found this random underwear in my underwear drawer. What is this? What. Is. This!!

I found out my partner had been seeing someone else. Looking back, like fucking dumbass, all the signs were there. Staying out overnight. She was starting to miss my calls. It was the giggling in the background when she finally answered. The little silences, the glances between them that didn't quite make sense at the time. But I was so quick to explain it all away because I completely trusted her.

What hurt wasn't that she'd fallen for someone else. I don't own anybody. It was that it was someone we both knew. It was someone in our friendship group. And then to learn everyone else knew as well, and accepted it as normal, was pretty fucked up to me. We'd laughed together, we'd partied together, they looked me in the eye. Not one person thought to say, "Hey Kelly, just wanna give you a heads up”

Nothing.

From no one.

That was the betrayal. Not just hers. It was the collective silence, the collective omission and I was clearly living in an illusion by the looks of it.

I became so debilitated by shock, anger, hurt, shame, absolute humiliation and the only coping mechanism I had came in a bag.

I couldn't stay. You can't stay.

I would have rather slept in my car than spend another minute near that house, near my partner, near those so-called friends, even near that town.

Absolutely not.

I immediately signed up to a house sitting site and got two house sits. A month each. I was like, fuck yeah. A bit of breathing room. No bills.

I also applied for a work transfer out of that town and, while I was waiting to hear back, because these things take ages, I drove four and a half hours to the town I'd applied to transfer to. I walked into that store and asked for the store manager. He came out to meet me at the fitting rooms. I shook his hand

I said, "Hi Jono, I'm Kelly Higgins. I put a transfer through. I just wanted to come down and introduce myself, you know, put a face to the name." He said maybe I wouldn't get the hours I currently had, but he'd look into it.

That same weekend I viewed a rental property and filled the application. I had some shares that I sold to give me a buffer which just tied me over.

And I got it. The house and the transfer with basically the same hours.

I packed up my humble belongings and moved towns and into my new home not long after.

My first night there I made myself a cup of noodles. I didn't have a TV or a stereo. I just sat down on my second-hand couch in complete silence and looked around thinking.

“Fuck. How did I pull that off?”

Slowly I started trusting people again. I'd have people over and I remember this one night everyone was just cracking up laughing and drinks were being poured. There was just this effervescence. There was liveliness! There was no one sitting in the corner grinding their teeth. No groups of three scuttling off into another room to have a pipe.

People were talking properly because they'd slept.

These people sleep!

Those nights became more common. Good people, good conversation, proper sleep. I'd spent those few months quietly rebuilding and creating a life that finally felt like mine

Then Brent texted me. I hadn't heard from this guy in years.

I just remembered that sex we'd had in that hotel room 14 years earlier

We did long distance for a year and he packed up his life and moved in.

Everything about us was just so peaceful. We still are. He had changed. He'd become a man. I'd become... I don't know.

We had booked this Pacific cruise for August 2023, and we're so excited to lounge around for 10 days. However, because someone can't pull out, we were expecting a baby instead.

Alfie arrived on the exact same day and almost exact time that the cruise departed.

Timing man

Looking back, I don't know if it was fate or whatever the word is.

It all felt divinely timed

And honestly, rude of it to be so perfect.

Now it's Sunday mornings at the miniature steam trains. It's sitting at the dinner table and the three of us are just laughing like idiots.

Five years ago, this life didn't exist. Neither did the woman writing these words.

I think about that head torch.

It only illuminated a few feet of ground. I had no idea there was an entire path slowly revealing itself in front of me.

I just took the first step.

Then another.

With each step, more of the path came into view.

I was walking towards living a life I never could have imagined.

Looking back over these past five years, I realise just how much I couldn't see.

I can't help wondering what else I can't see yet.

Then again, my track record for predicting my own life is appalling.