WARNING: This novel contains drug references.
Unedited. Quickly typed. There are some sentences which don't facilitate easy reading. Feel free to point them out, it will make things go faster for me ultimately.
Prologue
Sanity is becoming an increasingly attainable emotion. There are drugs on the market which claim to be able to make me happy in just a few weeks or months. I can’t be bothered to wait that long, though. If something works that slowly, I might not realize as it reduces me from an intelligent human to a babbling, radically minded idiot. The brain that I still can say I have is what makes me be able to think objectively and thoroughly... something it seems that less people can do nowadays.
However, that last paragraph was all hypothetical changes in intelligence, emotion, and freedom of thought. I should instead let you know who I am. After all, you are reading my life story.
I’m a twenty year old university student from a no-name town in America. My best friends went to art schools and music conservatories. However, I didn’t follow them. It’s not because art isn’t a passion of mine; I love painting and I play many instruments. Instead, I was more inclined to have a degree which would prove to be useful when I’m sitting at a desk being interviewed by a woman who will decide my future and whether or not I’ll be able to provide for my family.
Yeah, I’m a family man too. There’s nothing more I want than to have children and be a successful husband and father, but I wasn’t always ready for it. It was going to take a lot of time to get where I needed to be to understand how I can follow through with my dreams.
At that point, I couldn’t even have imagined that I would need a huge kick in the ass to get where I had to be.
And yeah, I wanted to have a degree and a family. I wanted all that up until the moment when I was eighteen that I found out I didn’t get accepted to any college I applied. Being such the intelligent person I am, I figured that if I were forced to go to a community college, I might as well just not go to school at all.
I was naive. I was stubborn and strongheaded. I was stupid.
Now, like I told you, I’m a twenty year old studying at a university. I ended up being where I had to be... just unlike most people my age I’m only beginning in a few weeks. I’m going to be a freshman who will just tell all of his friends that he took a few “gap years” and no one I meet will have to know the truth.
But you’re reading this. You’ll know what I went through. Just keep it quiet, between you and me, okay?
Chapter 1
This is where it began, a few days after graduation. I was kicked out of my house and forced to find my own job and apartment. My parents say I'm allowed back when I decide I'm ready to go to school.
I was staying with my friend.
“Just five, just count to five seconds and it will all be absorbed by your lungs. Don’t hold it any longer though,” he said, and so I inhaled from the tin foil. I’ve drank before, obviously. I’ve smoked cigarettes. I’ve had hydrocodone when I got my wisdom teeth taken out, but I’ve never tried anything like this. I don’t even think I could feel anything being pulled into my lungs, and if I did it was no more than just all in my head.
Whatever I didn’t feel though made me lose control. Imagine that you just won the lottery. Imagine that you were just told that you’re going to live forever and everyone will love you because you’re such a good person. This is what it felt like. Pure bliss. Pure, selfish bliss.
“One, two, three, four...” and I felt beautiful. I felt like I just learned that my entire family was in a planecrash, but they all survived unscathed.
This is how my first time smoking heroin felt. I had just graduated high school and I had not the slightest clue about drug culture or what I wanted to do with my life after all my dreams had been shattered, but what I knew was that I needed this thing to be running through my veins all the time.
At the time, I was undiagnosed with Bipolar 1 Disorder, something which wouldn’t come up until years later. The therapists say this probably attributed to why I started.
That’s the first instance that changed my life in a negative way.
The second one came disguised as a blessing. I never played the lottery before, but I decided to go to the convenience store down the street from my friend’s house and buy a ticket. Did you know that if you get all the white balls correct, you win 500,000 dollars? I didn’t know that until I came in and scanned the ticket a week later for the hell of it.
That pleasure was nowhere near that of smoking heroin though.
After all the taxes were taken away from it, the thieving bastards left me with only about half of my winning amount. It didn’t matter though. I looked for the cheapest apartment I could find, bought a Civic for my car, and saved all I didn’t need. I was buying the cheapest groceries I could find at the supermarket. Living pretty frugally was necessary for the amount of money I had allotted myself to spend on trying to find things which would make me happy in the way I felt before.
I knew that heroin couldn’t have been the only thing to be able to make me feel so wonderful.
“Hey, Alex?” I called him on the phone.
“What’s up, Jer?” he sounded busy, but I couldn’t wait any longer.
“I need more. I’ll buy for whatever price.”
“Don’t go telling that to a dealer. Let him name the price. Meet me tonight, I’m heading out to this guy I know. I’ll show you what a fair price is,” and so he drove me that night an hour to a place I’ve never seen. I always assumed that drug deals would happen in old, dilapidated and abandoned houses. However, the man we went to go see lived in a fairly large two-story house with a nice lawn and a wife that he obviously kept far away from his business. Alex addressed the man as “doctor” and they both acted very courteous to each other as I kept my mouth shut and let them do all the talking and dealing.
I stared at the two of them. I looked at the unknown man’s clean-shaven face and couldn’t help but wonder how many deals he had to have made before he could buy this house. I wondered how he could hide so well from his wife and baby crying in the background. I felt sorry that the child would have to grow up in such a broken household. There’s no way a dealer could keep up this charade for very long.
When we left the house and got back into Alex’s car, I couldn’t help but ask, “How do you know him?”
Alex smiled. “He’s my dentist.”
That’s when I realized that the addicts and the dealers aren’t the people that you see in movies. The dealers are your grandparents’ cardiologists, or the woman you’re talking to when you’re trying to find the lowest premium on your insurance. The dealers are people like you.
And the addicts are people like me.
That dentist’s child will grow up in the household of two intelligent parents, one of which I know is a doctor and a respectable person in society. Once the natural flow of the economy takes an upturn, that man won’t need to be dealing anymore, and I’m still going to be craving what he once could give me.
That’s when I started to think, what if I’m the wretch? What if I’m the parasite to society? Hell, I’m living off of cheap vegetables with a couple hundred thousand lying around in savings because I beat the odds by playing the lottery. I’m the one not doing anything with my life.
Once this train of thought became unbearable, Alex had just dropped me off at the front door of my apartment. I walked inside and sat down with my beautiful, new, untouched heroin. I took the tinfoil, sat down, and inhaled. All my intentions to continue thinking about how I should stop this pleasure-seeking before I fall down a slippery slope were suddenly gone. Again, what bliss. No, it wasn’t like winning the lottery, it was better than that. It was like an orgasm granted to me by angels, or even God himself. One long, beautiful moment of passion where I made love to my dopamine receptors.
And when that moment had ended, I found myself dreaming.
I dreamed that in heaven, there were no clouds. It was just like the world we live in now, but without war or currency. The same angels that had shot pleasure into my dopamine receptors were doing the same by just singing. They sang over a heavenly piano reverberating through the sky, and I could hear the echoes coming from everybody’s ears who surrounded me.
I looked around to get a better grasp of where I was. It was just a street lined with shops in my town filled with everyone I’ve seen around. Somehow I knew it was Heaven though. Somehow I knew things that I couldn’t have known had it not been Heaven.
My mother and sister stood smiling naively in front of me, and behind them was my cousin. My cousin stared at me over my family’s shoulders as if she knew just what was going on in my life. She stared as if she were trying to tell me to not be led down the wrong path because it’s not going to end up well. I heard her name being called.
“Nina.” Again.
“Nina.” Again.
“Nina is calling.”
I woke up in a coldsweat to my phone announcing that she was trying to reach me. I silenced it and tried to gather my thoughts. I wanted to smoke more, but you know what they say...
Too much of a good thing.
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