Reflections of Youth

Sometimes, it's those longing feeling for the days when I didn't care, days when I didn't stress about life, days when all I needed was ten dollars and a sharp needle. Those days when I was high, gloriously high, dopey and soft, and I thought that I was at the peak of human experience, with my heroin. The simple beauty I found in watching my blood rush up into the syringe, the thrill that was pushing down the trigger and sending my medicine directly into my being, and the pure eroticism of licking the blood off my arm. And the existential glory I realized when I was outside of reality, floating in pure euphoria. Those hazy days when I thought I knew where God was..... in my spoon

Sometimes, I can almost give myself a heart attack when the thoughts of smoking crack interrupt my thoughts. The smell and the sounds of burning rock in a pop bottle, the taste of bitter plastic in my mouth and the inevidable ashes on my teeth, the isolation of being locked in a hotel room with NOTHING! except the endless pursuit of more. MORE MORE MORE. And the dirty, disgusting lengths I would go to just to have MORE, whether I wanted MORE or not - I always needed MORE. I can remember running myself in cirlces, chasing that buzz. When my mind goes there now, it's like throwing a wrench into moving machinery: everything stops! I feel the stress and that anxious feeling in the pit of my stomach and I am thrust right back THERE. Back to that hotel room, back to the ghetto, back to that experience. But I know now, I can never run far enough or fast enough to escape the crack. The crack turns me into a monster. A monster that will always come back once you open that door and show it the light of day. A monster that will destroy everything for MORE

Sometimes, all it will take to put me in one of those awful places is a certain song on the radio. Or a street name where it all used to go down. Or a smell that reminds me of a junkie ex-boyfriend. Or the hours of 5pm - 7pm when I could give you a play by play of what I would be doing a year ago. The running and gunning. The phone calls. The hustle for money and an available dealer. The search for an empty parking lot to shoot. The sense of relief. Or a feeling that I haven't felt in so long because I smothered it with narcotics. I have been forced to re-define everyday life - but sometimes the past sneaks up on my and threatens my very existence with its nostalgia for what was. But my new reality can fight it back; back down into the dark corners of my mind where I know it is lurking, watching my try to stay sober, and waiting for me to be weak so it will have a chance to pull me right back into it