I opened my eyes and saw tall headlights burning through the open blinds of the living room window. I squinted, my head throbbing from the forming hangover, I faintly saw the outlines of a few people walking up from the driveway towards the front door.
I tried to scramble to my feet, but fell to the floor in the middle of the room and couldn’t get back up. I was glued to the floor.
The footsteps were at the door now. Shit, I couldn’t remember if I had locked it.
I heard the door handle turn. Okay, I definitely didn’t lock it.
The door opened and the first person I saw walk through was not who I expected. It was not some kind of sultry, haunting figure vaguely familiar to my addled brain. It was someone I knew far too well.
My dad.
He was followed by another person deeply ingrained in my memory.
My mom.
They walked in together with one more person trailing them who was more in the hazy realm of my brain.
The ghost. Her scorching eyes burned into me once she walked into the room.
“Why the hell are you here?” I screamed up at them.
“James, you know why were are here,” my said with tears in his eyes.
I watched my dad pull out a pipe and a small baggy out of his jacket pocket. He pushed the items down in my face.
“We already took these from the backyard.”
I was addicted to heroin. It was as simple as that, yet not quite as simple as that at the same time.
I wasn’t even fully aware I was addicted to heroin at the time I was in so deep. I smoked the stuff multiple times a day in the backyard and started the bad habit back in Oregon months before I moved down to Santa Cruz. So by the time I showed up there, my brain was an unreliable fog of hazy addiction.
The “ghost” I was seeing was actually my ex-girlfriend Tory. I had been ignoring her texts and calls, deleted her from my phone and Facebook contacts and she was desperately trying to connecting with me, knew of my addiction and was trying to get me back to normal before my parents found out. I had only started dating her after my addiction had started so my strung out memory and hazy vision inside the dark house clouded her in my mind. She was going to school up at Humboldt State so she could only do the long drive to Santa Cruz periodically for short periods of time to try and rescue me in the night and then would have to get back on the road in the early morning to keep her own education from falling apart.
After seeing how bad I was, she eventually caved and told my parents. They immediately jumped on a flight and came down to have an intervention with me.
Now I am far, far from my grandma’s supposedly haunted house in a rehab facility somewhere on the Oregon Coast wearing a white robe, sipping coffee all day, taking up smoking, and watching country music videos on TV (for some reason that’s all they watch here). It fucking sucks.
I sit in my white little room, with my born again roommate always telling me something about Corinthians or John 3:16 or some shit I have to tune out just wishing someone would actually haunt me.
Preferably someone sexy please. 
