Night-Time; Day-Time

An essay regarding my past struggle with opiate addiction

Much like a human lover he will lift you up, and you’ll impose upon the position an impossibility of return; you feel he will never treat you differently. There is an amorousness within your eyes embodying constricted pupils. It feels as if you have fresh, cool, vampire eyes. How beautiful. Some time after the caps are ingested you’ll feel your skin come to life with a glow that has the sensation of buttermilk and liquefied sugar. Your veins get thicker, and your limbs feel lighter. It’s a lift that starts from the inside like some kind of qualified space launch, but smoother, and slower….much slower.

Like insatiable newlyweds, the two of you start making plans. These plans are all one-sided of course, as he’s just your silent and loving partner. He’s just there for moral support, to remind you of how far you can really go. It’s like having some beautiful male just constantly nod at everything you say. There is so much belief in your abilities and your short-comings are never mentioned because, simply, lovers don’t speak of those things if they can help it.

You’re lying in your bed with him as the sun is coming up, going down, staying tightly hung; whichever you prefer, he will manipulate it so. With all of these preferable altitudes encompassing you, time comfortably passes. Your minutes are filled with bliss and internal fulfilment as he promises that your future will be illuminated just like this, for ever and ever. Soon you lazily realize you feel slightly groggy. That’s when the needles start to make their thin appearances in the peripherals of all sensation. They are the beginnings of the first amount of fear and negativity you’ve felt in about thirty minutes.

The way the rest unravels is much like an awful scene from childhood: you spend hours playing outside, by yourself, but still happily. Being so enveloped within your own imagination, you’ve drifted away from immediate familiarity, and now it’s growing dark. There’s a fear that’s been inseminated into you by the realization, and it bleeds like ink. You realize that the light isn’t nearly as bright and it’s getting to be cold. You feel weight returning to you, but it won’t stop growing heavier and heavier. You’re alone now, as your personified high has left, and with it you have a shoddy replacement of reality. It can’t be beautiful like it was before.

Your horribly crowded chest and the sluggish breathing that fills up your functions trigger anxiety and fatigue. These feelings meet in seemingly impossible circumstances inside you as you try to remember how much you’ve taken, or if you took anything else beforehand that might be mixing with the pills. Your mind is so foggy. You can’t remember any of the beautiful revelations that occurred during your tryst with the drugs, but you faithfully refuse to regret any of it. Falling asleep is a danger that can’t be thwarted, and so you dumbly and hazily close your eyes to it. Even when you wake up over and over with the most horrific difficulty breathing, and you’re gripped with a seizure composed of fear and paralysis for several seconds, there is no regret.

I can’t understand the mechanisms behind this process entirely, but over my years I know how much it felt like loving and being loved by someone. I used to be totally infatuated with the way it happens, even the decline. At the beginning I remember feeling as though I had found a love that was more pure than anything emanating from a human being. Even now when I think about it, I feel like I lost a best friend or some sort of dangerous fiance. It forms a relatively sick connotation in the connections of your mind, and in the layers of sentience that dearly hold compassion. There are plenty of nights when I wake up in the middle and feel this terrible black emptiness that I strangely equate to missing my mother. Not the way I miss her now in my life, but the way I missed her when I was really small. When she would leave I would feel this ridiculous upheaval of pain come out of me and into the world through my tears. It felt like there was no greater loss plausible than her presence, and sometimes that’s what it feels like when I think of how I lost Vic.

There won’t ever be days again in my life where I don’t think of opiates. With a devotion so strong to the substance that I had to refer to it with a name like a pet’s, I can’t exist as I did before. There are triggers everywhere, and some of them send me spiraling into jealous rage. It’s an incurable nostalgia; a dry and realistic delhirium. I would never introduce anyone to this through experience, only through writing.

If anyone were to knowingly introduce an innocent person to this drug, I really believe they deserve to burn in hell. I have so much anger and pain when I think of other victims like myself that were carelessly shown euphoria, but I feel so fortunate that the person who gave me this addiction had no idea. It was not on purpose. He never, ever could have guessed. I never want him to feel guilty, it would hurt me if he did. But I wish other people could understand the detriment and cease to bring it to effect.