Bliss.
Sheer bliss. There’s no other way to describe it as I sit here, reclining on my bed, my brain feeling as if it’s wrapped in sun-dried muslin, warm and fragrant and so very soft, so much so that it feels like a cocoon. In here, I am content, and the world outside this shell is a distant, faraway thing that cannot possibly hurt me.
Adjacent to that bliss, however, is a timer. And the seconds are ticking down until this bliss wears off, and the rats emerge from their ground holes to skitter along the edges of rational thought, insistent on being fed. It is, without a doubt, the most agonizing cycle for a momentary respite, a warm bath of white noise that makes everything else bearable.
I am an addict, and I am in full-blown relapse. Dilaudid, delivered intravenously, 4mg tablets at a time crushed up on a fucking business card – my own, no less – and dumped into a spoon. Add water, a little heat and cotton from the filter of an unsmoked cigarette, and bliss is delivered instantaneously.
My rational mind does this dance, this rationalization and justification and insistence that when I use these pills up, I can make it through the physical and psychological toll that inevitably awaits. I have kratom, plenty of it, and the hope is that my plug (isn’t that the correct term these days? “Plug.” The Velvet Underground waxed far more eloquently about the profession, but far be it from me to challenge contemporary nomenclature) will be able to obtain more, and that I will be able to afford it.
You honor, I’d like to enter into evidence Exhibit A of our insanity defense: the hope of continued use at some undetermined future point to survive what my brain insists is a full-scale mental and physical assault from the absence of the very pills that I currently enjoy.
Make no mistake: This is addiction. I drift off at night, pleasantly buzzed, attempting to fall asleep as quickly as possible so that I can get high as soon as my eyes open the next morning. I lecture to myself, insisting that halving those tablets, stretching the amount of time between doses, is critical … only to convince myself that there’s plenty of time to taper, that just one more won’t make any difference. I love the ritual, the small kit I’ve assembled of my works, including a tube of concealer to camouflage the track marks on my arm, because summer in the South is too stifling for long-sleeve shirts. I spend my downtime scrolling and browsing this forum, feeling some small sense of comfort that my love of narcotics is shared by others, and I attempt to bury the guilt I feel for giving up more than a decade of sobriety, and for not feeling more alarmed that I have.
And yet … this is bliss. This is beauty. This is everything. And I don’t want to stop.
Oh, I’ll soon have to. My supply is dwindling quickly, and at my current rate of consumption, I’ll tear through what’s left in a matter of days.
But in this moment, when my mind and soul seem suspended in gossamer cables of gilded perfection, that might as well be an eternity. It’s not, and I know this … but I can’t seem to summon the urgency my soon-to-be-fucked brain requires for the place in which I find myself.
I have no idea why I felt so led to write all this, especially tonight. My life is beautiful, wonderful, truly blessed, and I’m walking around the perimeter with a full gas can and a lit cigarette. I know this.
But this … this is bliss. And fuck, how I’ve missed it so.
Thank you for reading. Send up some vibes for me in a few days, because I’ll be in agony … but at the moment, I am a god.
Sheer bliss. There’s no other way to describe it as I sit here, reclining on my bed, my brain feeling as if it’s wrapped in sun-dried muslin, warm and fragrant and so very soft, so much so that it feels like a cocoon. In here, I am content, and the world outside this shell is a distant, faraway thing that cannot possibly hurt me.
Adjacent to that bliss, however, is a timer. And the seconds are ticking down until this bliss wears off, and the rats emerge from their ground holes to skitter along the edges of rational thought, insistent on being fed. It is, without a doubt, the most agonizing cycle for a momentary respite, a warm bath of white noise that makes everything else bearable.
I am an addict, and I am in full-blown relapse. Dilaudid, delivered intravenously, 4mg tablets at a time crushed up on a fucking business card – my own, no less – and dumped into a spoon. Add water, a little heat and cotton from the filter of an unsmoked cigarette, and bliss is delivered instantaneously.
My rational mind does this dance, this rationalization and justification and insistence that when I use these pills up, I can make it through the physical and psychological toll that inevitably awaits. I have kratom, plenty of it, and the hope is that my plug (isn’t that the correct term these days? “Plug.” The Velvet Underground waxed far more eloquently about the profession, but far be it from me to challenge contemporary nomenclature) will be able to obtain more, and that I will be able to afford it.
You honor, I’d like to enter into evidence Exhibit A of our insanity defense: the hope of continued use at some undetermined future point to survive what my brain insists is a full-scale mental and physical assault from the absence of the very pills that I currently enjoy.
Make no mistake: This is addiction. I drift off at night, pleasantly buzzed, attempting to fall asleep as quickly as possible so that I can get high as soon as my eyes open the next morning. I lecture to myself, insisting that halving those tablets, stretching the amount of time between doses, is critical … only to convince myself that there’s plenty of time to taper, that just one more won’t make any difference. I love the ritual, the small kit I’ve assembled of my works, including a tube of concealer to camouflage the track marks on my arm, because summer in the South is too stifling for long-sleeve shirts. I spend my downtime scrolling and browsing this forum, feeling some small sense of comfort that my love of narcotics is shared by others, and I attempt to bury the guilt I feel for giving up more than a decade of sobriety, and for not feeling more alarmed that I have.
And yet … this is bliss. This is beauty. This is everything. And I don’t want to stop.
Oh, I’ll soon have to. My supply is dwindling quickly, and at my current rate of consumption, I’ll tear through what’s left in a matter of days.
But in this moment, when my mind and soul seem suspended in gossamer cables of gilded perfection, that might as well be an eternity. It’s not, and I know this … but I can’t seem to summon the urgency my soon-to-be-fucked brain requires for the place in which I find myself.
I have no idea why I felt so led to write all this, especially tonight. My life is beautiful, wonderful, truly blessed, and I’m walking around the perimeter with a full gas can and a lit cigarette. I know this.
But this … this is bliss. And fuck, how I’ve missed it so.
Thank you for reading. Send up some vibes for me in a few days, because I’ll be in agony … but at the moment, I am a god.
