⚔️ TRACK 9 — “THE THREE WAVES THAT TOOK MY FRIENDS” (BIG METAL STORYTIME) [STORYTIME — PART I — THE FIRST WAVE] I grew up in the years when medicine turned into a loaded gun, when Oxy came in orange bottles that looked harmless in the sun. Doctors said it was safe, said it wasn’t built to addict, but whole towns learned the truth faster than science could predict. Kids took pills from cabinets, parents trusted every script, and nobody saw the cliff until the whole world slipped. It wasn’t rebellion, wasn’t thrill, wasn’t chasing some high — it was people trying to quiet the pain that wouldn’t let them lie. [STORYTIME — PART II — THE SWITCH] Then the price went up, the supply went thin, the sickness kicked in hard, and heroin walked in like a cheaper shadow wearing a familiar guard. It wasn’t alleyways or stereotypes — it was bedrooms, basements, cars, it was people who used to laugh with you under summer stars. They didn’t want the needle, didn’t want the label, didn’t want the fall — they just wanted the withdrawal to stop tearing through their walls. I watched friends fade into versions of themselves they never chose, watched the second wave rise like a tide nobody could oppose. [STORYTIME — PART III — THE FINAL CUT] Then fentanyl arrived — not as a drug, but as a trap, cut into everything, hidden in anything, waiting to snap. No warning, no countdown, no chance to call for aid, just a moment where life ended faster than it was made. People died in silence, died in crowds, died alone, died in places where they should’ve been safe, where they felt at home. Three waves, three eras, three pandemics nobody named, and every one of them left me standing in rooms that felt the same. [STORYTIME — SPOKEN MIDDLE SECTION] “You don’t forget the faces. You don’t forget the calls. You don’t forget the nights where you sit on the floor trying to understand how a pill turned into a needle, turned into a powder, turned into a funeral. People talk about choices, but they don’t talk about pain. They don’t talk about the way withdrawal makes your body feel like it’s breaking. They don’t talk about how fast fentanyl hits, how it doesn’t give you time to regret, to breathe, to fight. I didn’t lose friends to ‘bad decisions.’ I lost them to a system that kept shifting the rules until nobody could win.” [STORYTIME — PART IV — THE AFTERMATH] I carry their names like armor, not weight, a reminder of the years when survival wasn’t fate. I learned to walk forward even when the past screamed loud, learned to stand up even when grief pulled me down from the crowd. Three waves took too many, but they didn’t take my voice — and now I speak for the ones who never got another choice. This is the world I lived, the truth I won’t bend — a story with no heroes, just the ones I couldn’t defend.
