I lie alone as I prep my kit for my next shot. Needle, tupperware, cotton. Strewn on the other side of the bed. My last hit just barely tingles across my skin. It runs away from me, down my ass and back. My flesh is cold yet sticky from sweat.
"Fuck I can't wait to feel good."
...
"To feel so fucking good."
My skin is itchy and covered in sores. I absent-mindedly continue my usual ritual whilst scratching at an infected needlestick from a few days back. I crack a single pill from a blister and hear it clatter against the flaking plastic base of the tupperware container. It gets ground fine into powder. I accidentally scrape off a scab from my weeping wound and whince.
"Fuck."
I grab a glass of half-drunk tap water from yesterday still sitting on my bedside table. I can't be bothered to use sterile saline. I empty the rest of the glass into my tupperware vessel and stare blankly through the swirling alchemical pot of analgesia. My eyes hover there for a while. My mind feels deep in thought but really it's very empty.
My grey-blue eyes stare blankly at the wall in front of me. They're dry and red. If I wasn't so pale, from afar they'd be the same colour as my hollowed out lips. I've lost so much weight over the years I can feel my gaunt face and sharp features carve it's hatred into the world around it like a whaler carves into blubber.
I find an old uncapped needle, pricking my finger in my careless daze. I wonder what happened to it's lid, it has to be lying somewhere around here, but I can't be bothered to look for it, so it stays wherever it is and won't be found until the next tenants move in. Long after I've left.
I aspirate the pus from my tupperware abscess in lonely quiet. I think I feel calm, or maybe at peace? I can't tell. In reality I just feel nothing. I am so ugly in my own destruction. My hand traces down my pale chest and belly and finally grasps my bored dick.
"Ugh."
It doesn't feel like much but I imagine my brain flooding with endorphins very soon.
...
I undo a shoelace and struggle to fashion a janky tourniquet with one hand while I attempt to find a vein, ultimately opting for one that barely protrudes from the back of my hand, surrounded by a frequent IV user's far too many trackmarks. I tighten the tourniquet far too much. My arm goes numb and the tips of my fingers begin to tingle more than they usually do. I'm too empty to care though. I need my next hit to feel again.
I take one last look at the cloudy pleasure in the needle and think about how empty the syringe looks now. I continue to lightly stroke the tip of my dick with two fingers. I imagine the liquid in the syringe exploring the cavities in my body as it flows through me, dousing me in the beautiful toxicity I can't seem to get enough of.
I avert my eyes from my beloved hateful concoction and look towards the many trackmarks that line my forearms. I used to have the kind of veins that phlebotomists loved, but I threw that away along with everything I loved as well. My eyes continue to map out the recesses of my addiction.
I'm so far away from everything now in my hazy carelessness that, with my blown out veins, I struggle to stick myself. Sharp scratch. Light burn. fuck. It took four tries, but finally, flashback. Success. The needle pierces skin and vessel and kisses cold blood.
I tug the syringe plunger and watch a cool stream of fluid, a deep red, puff into the syringe, before I push down and force this new mixture of blood and stepped-on drugs into my body.
Opioids flood through my veins. The acidic chemicals burn quickly up my arm, and they don't care that it hurts. My veins continue to burn but soon I don't care either as a rush of pleasure flows over my body. Cold euphoria holds me in it's arms as I drift off into lonesome nods.
I slump my body into the bed. Make believe visions of highschool loves dance across the back of my mind. The needle jammed into my arm slips out and pooling blood spurts out. Onto my bed. Onto me. I'm nodding off too deep already and so the tourniquet that should have been removed a while ago remains, as blood continues to leave my body.
"I... Love... You..."