When you live in the same house with addiction, it's going to reveal itself eventually. No junkie can keep it under the lid beyond a certain point. The missing money. The late night trips. The talkativeness. The despondency. Rolled eyes and nodding off. All speculative, until addiction gets sloppy, and is left lying out in a ziplock bag next to a dusting of brown powder. Unfortunately it wasn't I who did the discovering, but my ex wife.

One morning I came downstairs reeling from another resplendent sleep entwined in caustic nightmares when she plowed into me, brandishing a clear plastic baggie with ten stamps of heroin. She took my keys, changed my phone number, and basically marooned me inside the four walled claustrophobia of our house where I would burn, freeze and vomit for ten days until the hurricane subsided (and still remain awake for another month with RLS).

Something as painful as that should have sent me diving through the second story window to my ultimate demise, or, if I survived, running fifteen miles to the dope man with my 9 in hand, knocking over a few Domino's Pizza's in my wake for fast cash. But something pulled me through it. Something intangible and soft as a baby's blanket in the mind had me by the wrist and was literally dragging me across Dante's turbid river. That was when I met God. And the Devil.

I began to get the feeling that at the time, despite my devout agnosticism, something "other", something white and ethereal was protecting me. And I also got the sneaking suspicion that something hateful was glowering at me from the dark corners (I stayed out of that damn basement). Whatever this power of goodness was, it could only protect me when I harnessed the willpower to help myself, but at night, when my conscious brain would flicker off like a floodlight, those "others" came calling.

I couldn't perceive anything in between, just a supreme love and a dismal hatred coexisting at the same time in my house. Several times when dozing below the surface I would experience a sudden violent juddering of the bed which definitely wasn't my or my wife's doing. I was stock still and the bed would just throttle like a kicking engine. Woke her up twice, and she was positively horrified. Something had lifted our bed by the foot and just dropped it. I can't say I wasn't about to scream.

However she would always depart by 7:45 am for work, and leave me alone in the room. By this time the sun was up, and I suppose I always held the superstitious platitude that when it's light, the demons go away. Not so. I could feel it in my blood. Like it was thickening and even overheating inside me as I scraped and clawed my way through each day. And the further along I went, the angrier they became. And so came that one Tuesday morning.

I was breaking in and out of sleep like a drowning head poking up out of the sea for gasps of air. In and out. The dreams were morbid, but I can only remember one thing. It was about a week in, when the worst of it had begun to subside. I was feeling the angels smiling and the evil becoming desperate. I couldn't say what time it was. Maybe 9 or 10 am.

My eyes fluttered awake and I lay under the sheets slaloming along the borderline between sleep and lucidity when out of nowhere there was a terrible sinking of the mattress all around me. Even the springs began to groan. My.mind first went to my Pomeranian Henry, but he was too short to scale the bed and even if he did he didn't have the legs span to straddle me or the incorporeal ability to crunch down on the coils with the weight of a grown man.

Something was climbing onto the bed. The mattress was trembling and the springs squealing. By now I was wide awake and clenched into myself thoughtlessly. All I could do was react. Fight or flight. Or stay. It all seemed so surreal until I called out my wife's name. Only a human being could be climbing on top of me, right? We hadn't had sex in a while and I was getting better, so perhaps she was feeling frisky, but when I repeatedly called out her name, there was no answer.

Deep down I knew this was an act of malevolence. It all became too real when the white sheet around me had tightened and began to pull all around my body. It was constricting against my skin like a forced cocoon. The sheets I yanked over my head so I couldn't see whatever it was. Once the sheet was skin-tight, a heavy weight relaxed against my body as I lay fetally, and it became hard to breath.

I felt like I was drowning. Legs, mid section, shoulders, and then clamped around my face, and this is what I will never forget - a warmth pressed against the aide of my face, and the sensation of hot breath blown into my ear, in tandem with an audible sound. The one we make when trying to make frost emit from our faces on a cold winter's day. I heard it clearly. Something the shape of a mouth expanded flush around the outer edge of my ear, followed by a hot blast, and then hhhhhaaaaaaaaaaa in a breathy whisper.

I flung the covers off of me and ran out of the room, finally driven to screams. I stood in the middle of the living room for God knows how long, staring at the staircase, waiting for the intruder to alight, but he, she, it, never showed itself. I prayed that God see me through. But God never came. I convinced my wife to give me my keys so I could go to the gym and "work the rest out" through sweating. Reluctantly she obliged. Very reluctantly.

I went to my dealer's place and bought a bundle of ten bags, and rekindled my addiction all over again. The angels left. I could feel their collective disappointment, and visualize the shaking of God's head before turning away from his divine lost cause. I satiated the thing's hunger. And it went on again for months, until I got into an in-patient program after dying on the table for three minutes. Fuck Fentanyl. I came home clean and sober, praying the fear of a newly restored God into Satan's black heart each night, and it never came back.

I'm not sure of how I can effectively sum this up, other than to tell you that God watches, and God listens, as long as you want to help yourself. He doesn't do charity. But the Devil will move mountains for you with the same fervor. Know who's side you're one, and never give up.