Sarah Coscolluela
Clark
AP Composition
09 February 2018
Scars Before the Scars
All drug dependency looks the same: the people look like they are rotting from the
inside-out; they may have scabs and injection marks all over their arms; they are incredibly thin
and correspondingly twitchy. Even when you do not know them, you can tell they are hiding
something. Their mannerisms tell us that they are deceitful and they seem to have an overall loss
of interest in everything that is not their substance of choice. Often, our perception of substance
abusers is, for example, a homeless person: someone that has given up their entire life, their
house, and their job for addiction. Sometimes we think of that one celebrity that we saw on the
news, the one that was admitted into rehab. The one with the mugshot that makes their skin look
scaly, their eyes look bloodshot, and their hair looks like they had been ripping it to pieces just
before the photo was taken. The typical drug abuser has a specific look that differentiates them
from the good people in society.
Bryce was in his late twenties when he started using. He looked just as you would
expect: he had a long, scraggly, and unkempt beard; he was terribly thin; his skin was pale from
never leaving his dark apartment; his pupils were small and constricted. He boarded up the
windows of his apartment and refused to communicate with anyone except his dealer. He got so
bad that his landlord couldn’t even reach him. He was given multiple eviction notices but
remained unresponsive until his father had to physically remove him from his dingy dwelling.
His father would describe the place objectively, but you could not help but hear the sadness in
his voice when he recounted the scene. He found his son curled up on a pull-out-couch mattress
that was saturated with feces and old vomit. On the floor were needles and those stretchy rubber
bands that cut off your arm circulation when you got blood drawn. There was no light in the
room, the lightbulbs had been ripped from their fixtures. The only food in the apartment was a
half-eaten bag of expired, salt and vinegar potato chips. When you see this image, it seems easy
to judge what kind of person he was; but you have to delve into his past to give him an honest
judgment.
When Bryce was twenty-three he survived a fatal accident. What began as another one of
his thrill-seeking adventures became a tragedy that would alter every aspect of his life. When he
launched himself down a seventy-foot drop, he expected to plummet into a chilling and deep
body of water. Instead, he landed feet-first into two-foot-deep water with only sand to break his
fall— and his feet. He had shattered both of his feet, broke five of his lower vertebrae, and tore
his spinal cord. These injuries took two and a half inches from his previous six-foot-three fame.
The accident created scars that would eventually lead to the self-inflicted injection scars. And
although he would be reconstructed...
