Untitled Story about Drugs

A Story by iliketowrite

“Operator”

“I think there has been an accident.”

“Can you tell me the location?”

“I don’t know where I am”

“Sir?”

“I think I’m dying”

“Tell me your location.”

“Please stay with me.”

It all started with a hit, quite literally. You are sitting in a circle with your friends when all of a sudden one of your friends pulls out a strange device, a vessel of swirling colors that looks very much like the funky cousin of the pipe you see in classy British films. Then he pulls the baggie out of his pocket, a tiny bag holding bizarre-looking green balls that seem to be compressed unto themselves. Then he offers you a “hit”, and you accept because it seems like the thing to do at the moment. You think nothing of it, the moment when your lips touch the warm mouthpiece and your friend puts his finger over the carburetor without you realizing, pulls out a silver Zippo and lights the green nugget. For a second you are not really sure what to do, then he reminds you that you have to pull, and so you do, and then your throat burns and your friend laughs and tells you you’ll get used to it. You’ll learn, he says.

You’ll learn.

It only takes one bad egg, I realize now. You can have as many true friends as you like, you can all spend your entire lives shitting out rainbows but all it takes is that one friend-gone-rogue and then you are all fucked.

“What came next?”

“After weed?”

“Yeah”

“Painkillers”

“Why painkillers?”

“They were easy to get”

“Of course. All you had to do was lift up a mattress, no?”

“You’re a smart one”

“I was a junior once too”

“Ha-ha. Aren’t you funny.”

One day, you are going through your mom’s medicine cabinet looking for Tylenol when suddenly, out of the corner of your eye, you see something far more interesting. It’s a little white container, and inside it there are little white pills. You take one out of curiosity. They have this little number on them, 512, and you don’t know what it means but you want to find out, and so you turn your computer on and there it is, the answer you are looking for.

You know what oxycodone is: you’ve heard of it. None of your friends have ever done it but you have heard that it is one of those things that people take when pain becomes unbearable. It gives them rest, a leave of absence from reality. You think your mom must’ve gotten them when she had her root canal done, but you can’t be sure. You’re home alone, and you’re not expecting anyone to be home in the next couple of hours. You want to take the little white pill, see what all the fuss is about. You want your chance at living a distorted reality, the blacks and whites and highs and lows of the dream world. You open your computer once again, but this time you look at how much to take. The website tells you that you’ll have to snort the pill, which makes you a bit uneasy because you associate snorting with cokeheads. In your mind smoking is okay, it’s cool, yet you find snorting a drug to be embarrassing, unacceptable, and somehow dirtier in nature than smoking, even when done to the same end.

You crush the pill using the back of your cell phone, and then you take out your wallet and then your school ID and you divide the crushed up pill into three lines. You cover one of your nostrils with your finger and, with a twenty-dollar bill, you snort one line. The explosion of pain in your nose knocks you back a little: you immediately feel dizzy and nauseous. Regret takes over. You are alone and scared, and you try to throw up and then you realize that it won’t do anything; the damage is done and you have to ride it out. You sit on your couch and wait, and then it happens.

A slight numbing sensation in your extremities and your nose itches. That’s all. Oxycodone is supposed to be orders of magnitude above weed, you think, and all it does is make you not feel your arms and legs and give you a nose itch. You laugh a little bit, and then you go to the kitchen to make yourself a sandwich. You need to take your mind off things.

That’s when it hits you: the first wave of euphoria.

You’re not quite sure how to explain the feeling. It’s as if suddenly you have gained all you want in life and there’s nothing left for you but to lie down and reap what you’ve sown. You’re fearless and content both physically and emotionally. All the tension slips from your body and you feel warm and utterly comfortable, as if enveloped by a warm blanket alongside a roaring fire. Lying in bed is beautiful, a trance-like state in which you are not sleeping yet you are dreaming nonetheless. Strange stories and forgotten memories from long ago pass through your eyes in a strangely three-dimensional way. Long lost friends and relatives whisper their wisdom into your attentive ears. You fall asleep to the most beautiful music.

If only reality was this pleasurable.

“I love you”

“I love you more”

“Most”

“Shut up, I love you more”

You don’t know what to do. You truly, honestly have no idea what to do right now. You fucked up and you don’t care about who knows you fucked up anymore. You are scared. You just want out of this sick game you are playing so you do the only sensible thing you can think of doing.

You call your mom.

“Mom, hey it’s me”

“Hi, is everything okay?”

“I don’t know mom, I feel sick”

“What do you mean, sick, like in what way?”

“I don’t know, I took something”

“What are you talking about? What did you take? Where are you?”

“I don’t know, mom. I don’t know. I’m sorry”

“S**t, s**t, s**t, where are you?”

You need a reason to keep on living and she is right there. So she becomes that reason.

Breathe.

Breathe in the air.

There’s no reason to be scared anymore.

Everything will be okay.

There is an order of things to the universe. Everything will always fall into place. You just sit there tight, and everything will turn out okay. The grass will turn green again and the sky will look blue. You’ll even be able to feel your heart beating against your chest once more.

You promise?

Have I ever lied to you?

You purge your soul into the toilet. You can think of no other way to get the feeling out of your gut. It doesn’t work. This is when you start to cry, the bitter tears running down your cheek and into the toilet seat.

“You have to stop.”

“Stop what?”

“You know what I’m talking about”

“It’s not that simple”

“It is. It has to be. You just stop, it’s about willpower.”

“I wish it was as simple as you make it out to be”

“But it has to be.”

“Why?”

“Because it just has to.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I love you”

“I love you too”

“You have to try, at least”

“I can’t”

“I’m pregnant”

“S**t”

She was the there, so she became your reason to live. She was supposed to be part of the solution. By the time she became part of the problem, you were too in love to care.

You tried, you really did. The pain was too strong. You were told the pain would go away, and you had believed it. But they had lied to you. The pain never went away, it just became worse and worse.

And she, that sweet angel, she had tried too. How she tried. She sat by your bed day and night, and helped you. She wanted it to work more than you ever wanted anything in your life. How she could love something such as yourself, you could never understand. But she gave you her heart, entrusted you with it. And when she found you unconscious in your living room, lying in a pool of your own vomit, you snapped her heart in two and shattered one half, threw all her dreams and wants down the drain, a punch to her already-showing stomach.

You kept the other half for the rest of your life.

“Operator”

“I think there has been an accident”

“Can you tell me the location?”

“I don’t know where I am”

“Sir?”

“I think I’m dying”

There is so much blood. There is blood everywhere. You know that ambulances are on the way because you just got off the phone with an operator, but you are starting to doubt that they will ever make it on time. You look around and see the wreckage of your car; you look down and see blood pouring out of your stomach. Dying feels strangely numb, strangely like being on powerful drugs. It’s a welcome feeling. You start to think of death as life’s last hurrah, as the numb feeling overcomes you and you close your eyes as the most beautiful music you have ever heard washes over you like a soft cloth.

You start to think about your life objectively, without fear. You have a child on the way, you’ll never get to meet him and you feel a distant pang of regret when you think about it. At the same time, you know that this is for the best. Then you remember, distantly, those wise words you heard once but don’t remember where: “There is an order of things to the universe, everything will always fall into place”. Then you feel yourself smile a little, thinking that whoever spoke those words was right all along, the universe was righting itself by killing you. It was giving a little unborn child a chance. You knew she’d do a good job raising him. The kid would turn out all right; he’d have a good mother.

You open your eyes to a bright night sky, your vision is beginning to blur. You feel your breathing becoming shallower and fainter, and suddenly you have a burst of energy and you take a huge gasp of air. You know in your heart it’ll be your last, so you hold it in for a couple of seconds. You slowly exhale. As you exhale, you think about her: the woman who briefly gave you hopes. You know you are returning the favor now.

Dying is like falling asleep: easy and painless. But when you expect darkness to set in, it is light that takes over. You feel your beating heart stop as the distant sound of sirens settles in.