It had been eight months since you had taken anything. The last time had left such a fermented, sour, and acidic taste in your mouth, enough to think you may never go back. If only you were so lucky. While you had been in the same room as people constantly using, it never peaked your interest. It only pulled bad memories from vaults of your mistakes and from life’s boredom with its throbbing melancholy. You had syringes of collateral damage and drugs others died for. They meant nothing to you over these eight months. The ones you had once obsessed over didn’t even hold a torch to your ever clearing sobriety.
About seven months in you started a habit of twirling the needle in your fingers as you went over the reasons not to use. It’s not as if the needle didn’t slowly gain weight each day. Becoming harder to flick from fingertip to fingertip. It slowly started to talk you down from the high point you had been sitting on. It had helped you off the saddle of the high horse, in the stable of soberness that you sat on. It was slowly becoming more and more appealing. With each passing night of sleeping alone and not with the drug inside you, you became restless. It’s not as if the memories of the past had vanished like the scars on your arm and your heart. You could still pull every mistake out like numbers from a hat. Randomly, well versed in detail, and in no particular order, but they were all there. It was right at the eight months when you had steered far from a sip, smoke, or seduction of the needle, that these waves came crashing on your shore. It was still implausible to even think of injection... or anything on that road.
It slowly turned from impossible to imaginable. It had worked for so many others how could you make it work? Some had done it in broad daylight, others only alone. As ideas turned over in your head you slowly began to piece the puzzle together noticing pattern after pattern. Then the tickets were handed to you. It was not a tasteful night. Engulfed and encapsulated by the big city and the bigger expectations you had placed upon you it started with a sip. As it caressed your lips it slowly tickled your tongue on the way down. Fuck, you had forgotten how good this could be. It didn’t have to be bad, did it? The sipping continued until your night was slurring together and you went out for a smoke. Succulents need for little water makes them work for almost everybody. That’s what you told yourself as you exhaled next to the bar bathroom. You were just getting a little water. As you watched the swirls of smoke slither into the night sky and neon lights you knew what was coming next. It took a while to get from the street to the couch and the coffee table. You had gotten back, back to the state you didn’t want to be in six months ago, or was it longer? As you were wrapping the rubber around your arm you tried to think of the date. It didn't matter, you twisted, tied and took off for the bedroom.
You didn’t always start on the couch. But you always ended on the bed for longer than anybody could imagine. Sprawled out, half under the covers you couldn’t quit. You knew after this first one, you’d be begging yourself and dealer for another hit. You watched it bubble with your flame being the heat getting it closer to the perfect point of penetration. The euphoria of watching it become ready brought immediate inertia to your stomach, like you had just dropped on a roller coaster. You loaded it. The next thirty seconds to a minute were hazy. You just remember the bite from the end of the needle and the hours of enjoyment that came after.
It wasn’t the best time you had ever had or was it? With your longest break since you’d had it last you couldn’t put any measurement on the positives, or negatives. You knew this shit was good but very different. You had not entered the same realm you expected to jump in. You had wandered around the room your old self-was once seated in and watched from the revolving windows. With your body knotted and grip tight you had still managed to let go of so much you couldn’t on a daily basis. The relaxation had swept you up from dark depths that were leading to places indescribable. While we didn’t know if they were good or bad you didn’t want to go back, not for as long as you could lay here this high. As you sipped, smoked, and shot up, you came to a wall of realizations. You began to read the graffiti sprayed on every cinder block you had just stood to build. Not sure how long it would last. The differences in your highs and lows were probably due to the drug you were on even as you slept. This high was more cleansing when you added the break. This dealer maybe your new go-to. You may be found on top of the world someday after this, or you may be found overdosed in this bed.
You could never read the end of the story while you were the writer. You reached to the side. You were ready for another. You watched the woman slowly slide the needle of truth right over your arm and stick in your vein. Gasping for air as you pictured this women from the movie that played in your head. Ready for some check out time. Amplified on this oxytocin. It was the Replase of Love...