One more theory about my missing friend Kitty

It was in a camp like this under a Seattle overpass that her
backpack and computer were stolen while she slept.

             The last time I heard from my friend Kitty was January 31, 2015. We had chatted online almost daily for at least a decade until that day. A drug user from the age of 16 or 17 she was going into rehab. During a late afternoon online chat the day she was waiting to be picked up by rehab operators in Seattle, she broke it off saying simply, ”they’re here, gotta go.”

That’s the last I heard from her but she has been on my mind often since then, particularly during intense times when I have been working on a writing project in which she is the central character. She will be 33 next Thursday.

            As time has passed I've thought of many reasons for her silence. They range from the positive (she rehabbed successfully and decided she had outgrown me) to the negative (somehow she had died from an overdose after failing at the rehab) and include several other scenarios as well.

                    Recent developments in the news have raised a new fear for her. In the past week or so the issues of opioid use and misuse have risen, particularly when an Oklahoma legal case went against one manufacturer to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars and another manufacturer facing multi-Billion- dollar court decisions has offered a settlement or it threatens to declare bankruptcy. In the meantime, an estimated 400,000 persons have died from use of “oxy” drugs.

            This news has made me recall the weeks prior to Kitty disappearing. At her lowest, she had slept several nights under one of those overpasses in Seattle. One night someone stole her backpack which had held her computer. For a time she hiked every day to a library where she connected with me so we could talk. Later she had moved into a house with some other women. She also reached another low point and had gotten into trouble with a dealer, owing him a considerable (for her) amount of money. In her condition where she had no steady income and had used up just about everything she had a hundred dollar debt is considerable.

            Under threat of physical harm he had her turning tricks to gain the drugs she needed and pay down the debt. It was one of those deals that kept her under his control because she was never going to be able to pay the debt as long as she kept using. That was partly her reason to find a rehabilitation situation, to escape him.

            Kitty’s drug of choice was meth, and over the years it had seemed to me she controlled it better than all the horror stories say is possible. But this drug dealer stopped giving her meth and instead substituted one of the “oxy” drugs. She told me she didn’t like it but that was all she could get so she used it. Thinking back I recall now a change in her once she started using that drug. Though there were highs and lows constantly over the years, generally she seemed to function and was even happy with the meth. At the time I didn't know opioids were as bad as we have learned. In fact, I thought she might be better off than with methamphetamines.She did turn more serious and more depressed with her situation on the oxy, and probably with the situation with the dealer as well.

            As opioids have come more into the forefront and I have learned more about them, it has me beginning to wonder if that is involved in her disappearance. Could she have disappeared into a mental haze caused by the drug? Could she have overdosed and died? Could the dealer have caught her? It’s one more possibility added to the already full basket of causes, none of which has provided an answer to date. So, she'll be 33 next week. We talked once as she approached 30 about how she was beginning to look a little more seriously into her future. I suggested she might be approaching a change into maturity in life and she agreed that might be happening and being willing to accept it. But now almost four years later the greatest mystery of my life has grown even deeper.

BELOW ARE A FEW CONVERSATIONS FROM OVER THE YEARS
One path to life on the street
Busted
Another descent into that methamphetamine mind
Out of the haze of drugs a day of optimism
Conversation with a young prostitute