WARNING: This may be a downer
I'm one of those rare people that has lived in New York all my life, with the exception of a year abroad doing the whole rehab/halfway-house thing. I grew up in Brooklyn and for the first half of my life things seemed real fucking dandy. I loved being a kid honestly, and was lucky to have a pretty stable homelife and that feeling of security that all children should have. I was a shy boy, but I did manage to always make a few close friends, and that sattisfied me. My expectation's of life were huge- I planned to be a baseball player, an artist, and to marry the girl on the cover of MAXIM magazine.
When I turned ten I started to have these weird thoughts that deeply disturbed me, the main one being that I couldn't prove that other people were conscious. I don't know when the idea popped into my head, but it was sometime after watching the Truman Show. At first it was just a minor nuisance, but within weeks it grew into a full blown obsession. To make matters worse, I started to do these strange "rituals" to relieve myself of the anxiety. It started off with me doing things like touching my door knob a certain number of times, or making sure to skip the cracks in the sidewalk on my way home from school. Within a month or so, it started to escalate though. I began to not only have to touch the fucking door knob, but allso jump up and down ten times, recite each of my cat's names in a specific sequence, lick dirt off the ground, and eventually much more embarrasing things that whoever is reading this can try to summon up with your own imagination.
I obviously thought I was going insane.
Eventually my mother realized that I had become extremely withdrawn, and was behaving oddly in general. She scheduled an appointment for a therapist, and within one or two visits, it was determined that I should be admitted into a childrens psychiatric ward. I don't really remember much of the time I was there, other than it was incredibly horrifying. One night I was laying in bed and I started crying because I was scared and couldn't fall asleep, so a nurse came in and told me to stop whining because I had a lot of things that the other children didn't. For some reason, this really struck a nerve in me, and I shut up. She gave me some benadryl, and I went to bed. I was released from the hospital after a week or so, and admitted to some NYU program that specialized in Childhood OCD. I was put on zoloft, and recieved cognitive behavioural therapy for several months. Eventually, the Sertraline kicked in, and I felt relatively free of the symptoms. I went back to school, and returned to a fairly routine way of life, though looking back I know something had changed in me. I became incredibly flamboyant, and for the first time popular in my grade. I would draw porno comics for other kids, and stand up to the "popular" assholes who spewed out diarhea storms of homophobia and ignorance.
When I went into highschool, things changed a little bit. My parents split up, and my dad began to drink and get high quite a bit. I didn't know what to make of my father, and I began to hate my mother, so I started hanging out with my friends more and more. I also became plagued with that highschool insecurity, and for some reason decided to stop taking zoloft. Within a few months I started to get these really bizzare ideas in my head again, and they became so strong, that they actually effected the way I saw things. I would look at myself in the mirror and see a horribly distorted, hideous figure. It really freaked me out, and every small, nasty comment spewed out to me in a typical highschool fashion felt like rubbing splinters into an open cut.
Then I went to college, and I started using heroin, and it worked. All that fucking noise died out, everything seemed beautiful, i felt fulfilled. There is no drug like heroin in my oppinion, some other opiates come close, but none of them, even oxymorphone, deliver like smack does. I remember my early day's of using, where me and my friend would go into the shed in his back yard and cut lines out on a stool and nod out listening to The Velvet Underground, or other classically cliche artists to do heroin to. We'd just sit there smoking ciggarettes, burning our fingers and our lips, occasionally talking to some invisible ghost, and then we'd jerk out of it and go for a walk along the park, and tell eachother all the shit we were too afraid to say when we were sober. I always look back at that time with a certain sense of nostalgia, because there is nothing like doing the best drug, with your best friend.
Eventually, of course, I managed to complete the cliche when I started shooting, and everything really started to go wrong. Visits to ICU, infections, asthma attacks, severe respiratory depression, the works. Everytime I'd get out though, I'd eventually fall back on the dope. I think there was a time when I used heroin to fill up whatever I thought I was missing out of life, but eventually, those things didn't matter anymore, and the only thing I wanted was more and more heroin.
Late last fall I came down with a staph infection from shooting cocaine. I spent five weeks in a hospital, my mother came every day and sat by my side telling me in one way or another "look how you've fucked up your life". I agreed to AGAIN ammend my ways, and for the past five months or so I have kept up my word. I have not shot heroin, I have not shot cocaine. I take buprenorphine, I go to school, I get good grades.
But this shit has it's teeth in me, and it flips me out. Somedays I'll walk outside, and there will be a light breeze in the air, carrying a pleasant smell, and it will triggere this reaction in my brain that makes me go "shit, i need a shot". Other time's I'll be walking down Broadway in the city, and I'll look up at a giant Calvin Klein add sporting some highly erotic imagery. I'll look back down at the street, and all the people passing by holding their shopping bags from Macy's and Uniqlo, typing on there smart phones, and I'll get this deep burning hatred in my heart, and an incredible drive comes over me where I just want to jump into the nearest Starbucks bathroom, switch the door to occupied, and slam as much heroin and cocaine into my veins as possible.
I trip on the street-Heroin
Someone trys to get into the train before I leave-Heroin.
Crunch (the gym)-Heroin
College student's smoking ciggarettes-Heroin.
Live music- Heroin
Williamsburg/Buschwick-Heroin
The mirror-Heroin.
![:\](https://bluelight.org/xf/BL_Images/Orig_Emoji/wrygrin.gif "wry grin :\")
not a good state of affairs... I was stoned and I was hysterical... not a good combo.
Well, funny the way the world works, but soon after discovering BL I came down with a cold. Not a bad cold, but it was one of those that ends with a lingering cough that keeps you up all night. My husband and 8 year old daughter had it too. She went to the doc first because like all overprotective rents, baby goes to the doc at the drop of a hat. Daddy and I were toughing it out because a cold's a cold and there's really nothing you can do about it. He broke down first and saw a doctor who prescribed Tussinex for the cough. He had no idea what he had his hands on. But I did.
