After surviving a 48-hour debilitating migraine headache, I woke up this morning feeling energized and great. I made some turkey meatballs and cleaned the kitchen and by the time Lewis went down for his nap, I was finally ready to clean out my car–which is actually Kristi’s car. I called it her car because it still smelled like her and it hasn’t been cleaned out since she left. I think I have been secretly putting off cleaning it because I didn’t want to cover her smell and life she left behind in the one thing I have left that was used daily by her.

First, I am so grateful to have her car. My mom bought it and gave it to us because we have been surviving with one car between the three of us for the past year and it has been a difficult to say the least. It is exactly how Kristi left it: bent a little with the front bumper taped on with ducked tape. This was from a little wreck she got in the last time I saw her in October… (but that’s another story). I love it and I love that it was Kristi’s and that now it has Lewis’s car seat and toys in the back. Thanks, mom.

So I finally got the willpower to clean that sucker out. It has been driving me nuts because if you know me, you know I like keeping my car clean. However, like I mentioned before, I didn’t want to clean up the remnants that Kristi left behind (weird, I know).

I found more than I wanted. I found remnants of her heroin addiction. I sat in the driver’s seat of where she most likely used over and over again. I sat and felt sick. I wanted to puke. I didn’t feel sick because I missed her being here. For the first time, I actually felt so relieved that she is not here. I felt sick because I realized that I was glad she wasn’t there in that driver’s seat instead of me.

I texted Holly and told her what I found and how I felt. She agreed and said she was living in her own hell. Alone. And that was her body’s addiction.

Now that battered, abused, tormented body that housed my twin sister is buried in the ground. It’s retired and laid to rest. Her soul is with my dad. My grandma. And other loved ones who have passed who love her and will help her in ways we couldn’t have here. And she is in a place where she can be free and grow…”brighter and brighter until the perfect day.”

Her soul now is with me when I am sad and when I need peace. Her soul while she was here on earth was taken by a drug addiction and was in total control of her agency.

She was more dead and gone while she was alive than she is now.