Whenever I needed to mentally leave a situation I was in, I would look up to the sky and search for airplanes. I imagined myself as a passenger going somewhere far away. I imagined my life in the clouds—the freedom of the sky. As I would fight the hot tears armed and ready to roll down my cheeks, I would repeat in my head, “I want to go home.”

I didn’t know where home was but I knew how badly I craved finding it. My mind would slip away, much like I felt my life was doing. At the time, I had never been to an airport before and although I was in the backseat of my parent’s car on the way to one, it wasn’t to get on a plane. It wasn’t to go find my home. My parents and I were going to pick my sister up from her journey from New Hope Addiction and Rehab center in Las Vegas, Nevada.

She was a shell of a person and I wish that I could describe the soul that inhabited her body before heroin but I don’t know how to. It was as though the emptiness in her eyes told a story of what path not to take and erased any memory of before.

Even now I couldn’t come up with one thing to say as to why I decided to go along to get her from the airport. As a junior in high school, I had many other options for a Friday night that didn’t involve disappointment. Maybe I was hoping to see the new and refreshed person that all of those places advertise. Maybe I wasn’t hoping at all.

We had arrived at the airport an hour early and barely speaking to each other. The silence between my parents and I was so constricting that I could feel it wrapping its arms around me—stealing every other breath from my lungs. My legs were following my parents, but every muscle in body screamed to just turn around and wait in the car. I wasn’t afraid of her. I wasn’t afraid of what she’d look like. I was afraid of myself and the anger that coursed through my veins.

The thing no one understands about drugs is that they are more than a substance. When a drug enters a household, a person’s bloodstream, a family, it becomes a living thing that weighs everyone down. Heroin whispered to my sister with lust tearing her down to her knees. But Heroin whispered to me with rage poisoning my perception of her broken body on the floor—my perception of her folded over and dying on our dinner table.

I sat in a cold airport chair away from my parents. An airport worker dressed in a neon yellow vest, sat beside me. He had to be in his twenties and yet exhaustion was etched into the bags under his eyes. In his hand was a light orange and white book titled The Catcher and The Rye. The thought of him reading that book, in that particular moment, and next to me seemed more powerful than it really was.

I could have been reading into the situation too much, as I often did with everything. My sister was the first person to introduce me to the power of words. I had already loved books; my mom took care of that. But my sister showed me that I had the ability to put my thoughts onto paper and create something beautiful. Maybe that is the importance of this reflection of the shell she was.

There’s a lot I don’t know when it comes to the things I did pertaining to my sister and how I thought. Perhaps that’s why I write about her so often, why I find traces of her between my words and syllabus even when I don’t try it.

When we arrived at home, my sister sat on the couch and I sat in our mom’s old red chair in the kitchen, watching. I was going to let her leave when her boyfriend arrived, but I needed some grasp of control before it came to take her away again. She sat like a bird trapped but in a cage wide open. I wasn’t sure if I would ever see her again, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to. But as the clock ticked by slowly, I begged to a God I didn’t believe in to make her stay.

It was 11:02 p.m. and I gazed over her stained skin as she stood at the arrival of her boyfriend’s car. It was 11:02 p.m. and the blinking headlights outside seemed to welcome me to a world of pain I had yet to experience. It was 11:02pm and Heroin came whispering in our ears.

I followed her out the door not to say goodbye, she didn’t need to hear that, but to look up at the airplanes flying to somewhere better—somewhere like home.