It’s Sunday, and there’s no dope, nothing, no morph, no hammer, and we are down to aspirin. Fucking Jesus, what a wonderful world this is. We can’t get on until tomorrow, and today is the day of hanging out, that is going cold turkey for approx 28 hours till 8am tomorrow.
My partner’s mind is racing and he is trying to read a book, he is trying to remain calm – sometimes I wonder if the biggest killer is the anticipation, the knowing that soon he is going to be sicker than God, and that everything is going to hurt and scream and shriek until he goes insane and does something. Not that there is anything that can be done – we have no money or resources to change the situation and we’re not really the crime types. We don’t rob, kill and maim for drugs. In fact we are the “let’s pay the phone bill so we don’t go score” types. But it doesn’t make it any easier.
The physical side is bad enough, to be offended by your own odour because all your senses are overloaded, your sense of smell screams that you reek like a hole digger after a hot day in the sun, even though you had a shower before you went to bed last night. It’s because of the toxins in your body, the poisons you inject every day, and the fact that without the junk, you sweat as your sweat glands go into hyperactive overdrive.
It’s the way your body — which ceases to run your stomach when your using junk — decides to purge now that you are without junk. There is nothing more intense than spending your entire day in the bathroom sitting on the toilet while retching your heart out into the bathroom sink. You have no idea how bad this smells when you have heightened senses. Your skin crawls, and you know your hair has six weeks worth of grease on it. Every nerve screams pain, hunger, I need, I need. And that’s just the physical side of it.
Emotionally you’ve only just begun — you know how long you have to go, and you know you can make it — but emotionally you never know. You just know you hurt and there is an instant cure and some fucker who must hate you won’t let you have it. Your mind races, and you become increasingly paranoid – its not that you can’t cope, it’s just that telling your subconscious to behave is so much easier when you don’t run a habit. This subconscious is no longer a persistent crying baby, it is now an enraged teenager and it wants blood! It screams and tears relentlessly.
It’s hard to fight back the emotions, the anger, the rage, the grief, the hurt. It comes flooding in waves as your body creates emotions to release the much needed endorphins to fill your synapses. It has to work with extremes.
Once he was fighting with the flat mate, and was incredibly enraged, and wanted to go out in such a vile state of temper at midnight, or to physically attack our flat mate, I stood in the way. The end result was a broken nose. This isn’t included to solicit your sympathy. What is interesting is that the rage and the anger is uncontrollable, he was crying and carried me into the bathroom and all the while he is throwing punches at the wall and still going on about our flat mate who he was fighting with about whether he got a fair share of the dope.
He was hanging like a cunt, the small amount he had could no longer contain the monster inside. It got out, despite his best efforts. His body and his addiction totally controlled him, and what was left behind cried for the problems he had created, the hurt he had done to his beloved and how far removed from humanity he felt at that time.
Yet he is intrinsically a beautiful and gentle man, whose biggest problem is that often he cares too much, never too little.
This weekend we have two whole days to get through, and though he’s going to hang, we’re quietly confident that the monster will stay locked in the cage, that he is in control, and nothing is going to go wrong. It’s a long time till Monday morning! - J.
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