There's not a lot going on today. I had a tute today and have another lecture in a little bit. I ran into town and got some errands done. I bought my first piece of Australian clothing. It was a white singlet that looks like something you'd pay $35 for from Urban Outfitters. Except this one was only $10. My back hurts and I'm tired from being up early for my class. I'm glad I was up early though, it mean I was already awake at 8:10 when we had a fire drill. That would have been the worst way to wake up and no one was happy about it.
Anyway, here's an excerpt from the latest project I'm working on--Black Tar--the one about heroin. Hope you enjoy it.
An Excerpt from Black Tar
Surfing on cloud nine at four in
the morning, we were cruising through Cape Girardeau without a care in the
world. I always felt like I knew myself better when I was high, like I could
access parts of my mind that were otherwise dormant. I felt like the lights
came on inside my mind, like I could see in colors that didn’t exist. I felt
like my brain was more aware of itself and I could, and would, spend hours
inside my head, exploring far away corners and hard to reach places. That
night, driving along in that Eldorado at 40 miles an hour, the city lights whispering
in my ear, I was deep inside myself when Loz pulled me back into reality. She
was whispering, although, to her, I’m sure it felt like she was screaming. She
was whispering my name, trying to call me back to her. When I looked over at
her I immediately knew she was dying. Her skin was ghost white and I could see the
color bra she was wearing through her sweat-soaked white top. Her hair was a
mess, painted to her face. Her eyes were closed and, in the shadows, looked as
if they ran the length of her face as her eyeliner, mascara, eye shadow, and
who knows what else, bled in long smudges down her cheeks. She was slouched in
her seat and her head rattled against the window as the car coursed over small
cracks in the pavement. At first glance, most people would have thought she was
already dead.
The thing most people don’t
understand about drug users, recreational and addicts alike, is that they die
regularly. I’ve died at least four times. Like, really dead—not breathing, no
pulse, dead. I’ve seen the light at the end of the tunnel. Sometimes it’s like
you’ve only been asleep and when you wake up and open your eyes, someone tells
you that you’ve been dead for the last seven minutes. But sometimes it’s much
different. I’ve stepped out of my body and yelled at myself to come back to
life. I’ve hovered over my corpse, screaming in vain and cheering on whoever
was trying to revive me. When you come back to life, you’re slammed into your
body. It’s like a jump. One second you’re staring at your lifeless body,
wondering if this is the time you really
die, and the next, you’re opening your eyes and you can feel all those human
things you wish you couldn’t, like pain—the pain of your cracked sternum from
CPR, the pain of a bad trip, the pain of your body decaying. It feels like you’ve
injected yourself with a needle full of gasoline and, for a split second, all
you want is to be dead again. It feels good to be dead. Dying can be painful
and terrifying, but once you’re dead, all the pain is gone, but sometimes the
panic stays with you. Coming back to life has been one of the worst experiences
of my existence. But if heroin has taught me one definitive thing, it’s that there
is, undoubtedly, an afterlife.
Get amongst it
~Daniel
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