These sleepless nights draw on and on, hanging like black velvet curtains over the great stage of this mortal coil and veiling things beyond from curious eyes. There is more to the affair of living than we perceive, and much of what we fail to see will return to haunt us in the dim future. The passage of time has become a grating, terrible thing, and I feel my connection to this world, these people around me diminishing at an ever increasing rate, like coil of old rope fraying and coming apart, just breaking down and unable to bear its load much longer. When it finally splits, I expect I’ll be launched headlong into some fresh nightmare, fouler still than anything I have dared to imagine thus far. I feel failure, regret, shame and exhaustion amassing within and about me like pandemonium-winds. It’s times like these when my mind wanders toward insalubrious notions, like the idea that smoking meth or crack will relieve this awful dissonance and put everything broken inside me right again, even if only for a day. I tell myself this relief comes with attachments that aren’t easily shaken off. I know better. I need to stop thinking about it because what little sanity I have can diminish further and I can lose more than just money and sleep.
I hardly remember being a drug addict of the lowest order, though I know it happened despite my persisting disbelief. I even remember the exact moment I acknowledged that certain changes had come over me, and that I was wallowing in deeper shit than I’d ever previously imagined. I’m still not sure how I got out of that terrible place in my life, apart from by the grace of God himself, which played an inexorable part in my emancipation from the pits of addiction. I can’t help but wonder what parts of myself died during that period, and if I’m better or worse off without them.
I’m not sure I know exactly who I am now anyway or if what’s survived is worth keeping. Misery abounds, even in the after-reek of addiction one continues to fester for a good long while, and some stains don’t ever wash out. It’s a tricky devil. Many never see it for the sleight of hand that it is, and even some who can comprehend in advance the severity of the circumstances of hard drug addiction seldom make it out. Adam is like that: a thirty-year veteran meth user whose life is on the wane. There’s not much left for him but what he’s already got at this rate. He’ll never hold a steady job or relationship, never own a home, he’s already been in congestive heart failure for years and suffered strokes and heart attacks, and he’ll die a toothless vagrant. What’s worse is that Adam is, by my reckoning, not a bad fellow. He deserves better, but he won’t get it and it’s precisely his own doing, though that doesn’t make it any less sad. He’s more meth than man now, and I believe it’s overtaken him. I don’t think he even minds the invisible bugs anymore. He probably doesn’t even notice them.
I remember when I first felt them crawling across my face, like little lice, or gnats flitting about in my peripheral vision, hopping about erratically, and as I’d swat at them, they’d vanish. It didn’t take long for me to understand that there were no bugs. They simply weren’t there and that this was a side effect of smoking meth. It was a grim portent of what could be, and having seen it as such, I scaled back my consumption of the drug drastically. It’s not just bugs, though: there are noises too, and intrusive thoughts of all sorts of foul shit that come flooding into your brain on meth. There’s nothing more chilling than hearing an audible scream, or a whisper around the corner, or just outside a closed door, only to repeatedly check and find empty, silent nothing waiting for you, and realizing later one that you were simply chasing shadows, bogies made up inside your imagination. They’re pretty damn convincing when your down in the shit with them, though. I’ve seen things that weren’t there, too, after a five-day bender on IV crack without sleep, but that wasn’t as horrible and tormenting as the crashes, screams and murmurs of things you can’t find, or the bugs. It’s easier, or at least less maddening, to lock eyes with a grinning aberration that you can see at length than to be inundated with bursts of noises and sensations you can’t quite track down at brief intervals.
Even still, quite some time later, drugs are precious to me. All the more reason to remember getting high is a curse, a mockery of religious experiences. In a sense, smoking hard drugs or shooting up is an anointment of sorts: once it touches you, it changes you forever. It’s a sort of vulgar asceticism in which you cast off money, family, friends, health, and hope in order to change something within you, something broken that calls out to be fixed. Abusing drugs is ritualistic, like flagellation. It equates to supplication before the throne of a benighted false heaven. It’s a lie, and an exceedingly beautiful one at that—which renders it all the more potent.
Towers of Rust 