Flirting with Death
Her child almost followed her to the grave.
THE STORY
Esther was addicted to drugs. As a single mother, she struggled to carry everything on her own: the pressure, the loneliness, the weight of raising a child with no one to share it with. So she found an escape. A room, a locked door, except she often left it open. Low music. And a candle, lit every single time, because that's the mood she needed to do what she was about to do.
She got high. Regularly. And because she was high so often, she became careless. Her son, still a baby, would wander into that room while she was somewhere else entirely, lost in her high. He was drawn to the candle, the one warm light glowing in the room. He'd reach his hand close to the flame, close enough to feel the burn, not quite touching it, and cry from the pain. Most times, she didn't even notice. She was too far gone to see what was happening right beside her.
The people around her could see what she couldn't. They watched her slowly losing herself, slipping further away with every high. But Esther couldn't see it. All she could see was the fun. The escape. The high. She was blind to the danger because the danger felt good.
She got out eventually. It wasn't quick, and it wasn't easy, but she got clean. And once she did, she wanted a permanent reminder, something she could see every day, of what she almost lost, and what she managed to walk away from.
That's what this painting is.
THE ARTWORK
In it, Esther is dancing with a skeleton, death itself, holding it close, a cigarette in her hand, completely at ease. It doesn't look scary. That's the point. Addiction rarely looks dangerous while you're inside it. It looks like comfort. It looks like fun.
Below them, her child sits alone by a candle, hand hovering close to the flame, crying. He's not in danger of dying in that moment. But every night this happens, it adds up: a slow kind of harm, the same slow harm his mother was doing to herself without realizing it.
This painting doesn't show what addiction eventually leads to. No hospital bed, no rock bottom. It shows the part right before that, the part people don't usually talk about: the high, the comfort, the fun, because that's the part that makes it so hard to walk away from. Most things that destroy what we cherish the most, our health, our time, our relationships, and our wealth, don't happen suddenly. They happen slowly, one enjoyable moment at a time, until it's almost too late.
Esther is sharing this story because she's not ashamed of it anymore. She danced with something dangerous for a long time before she found her way out. Now it hangs on her wall, in full view, every single day, not as something to hide, but as a reminder of exactly what she survived.