DOSE:		IV	Heroin	(powder / crystals)
		IM	Naltrexone	(powder / crystals)

Sometimes it makes me happy. That's all I could think of, the only morsel of a reason I could cough up for why I continue time and time again to put myself through this shit. Why I severed all meaningful relationships in my life. Why I rip people off. Why I willingly peddle just another piece of my soul for one more glimmer of that brown womb. It's why I continue to push today into tomorrow, blending the promises of yesterday with the anxieties of the now. That's really what all this is about, avoiding the now. Preventing the inevitability of direct experience from making its way into my frontal cortex. Just a crumb of the brown powder and the worldly noise dissolves along with it into that spoon. The rising vapors fill my nostrils triggering a primal response deep within my being. Has it always been there, or did I manifest this beast? Maybe this longing to be back in the womb is something more ancient. Or maybe it's just a reflex due to the negativity felt from the atmospheric sickness this society parades around? Either way it begs the question which came first, the chicken or the egg? Am I using to run from something that came before the heroin or did the heroin just create the very thing I am running from. Maybe it's a combination of both, maybe it's neither. Who gives a shit, I'm ready.

I stare down, fixated on the task at hand. Once it's done I cap, sit back and close my eyes. My body can't support itself halfway through going from hunched over to laid back and I collapse. I did too much. I think. The sickness is gone, my pain isn't there anymore. Nothing is. I am alone, I hope I don't stop breathing. I see something in my mind, a motherly figure, not my mother, but a mother. She smiles, it warms my heart, but she cries for me as well. I cry along with. This can't last. Nothing ever does. This certainly won't. Nothing is more apparently finite than the high of heroin in the depths of addiction. Never am I more aware of the passage of time as I sit moments after the rush realizing that this can only last so long before the first signs of the sickness begin to creep into my being. As this mother leaves my vision I see something else. An amorphous presence. Darker, just as ancient feeling as the mother but cold. Like the taste of steel, the morning after a coke binge. It does nothing, it just stares at me. I fill with dread and discontent. I reflect on myself with pity and disgust. Shame resonates like the blasting of cathedral bells. I wake up, shake my head and splash some water on my face. Pinned pupils stare back through me. The thoughts that drive me mad are there, but muffled. You're not good enough, you've wasted so much already, you'll never get back the time you've lost, you can't do it, you have to do these things, you always pretend, you're a liar, you're weak, you are nothing.

Fast forward and I am home at my parent's house. I'm administered the vivitrol shot, while high mind you.

**Never do this, my father was a doctor and we had no idea what to expect. I couldn't stay clean long enough to get the extended release shot and I needed the shot to get clean, good 'ol catch 22 for you - Yossarian would laugh in a maniacal manner telling me to suck it up.

Where was I, oh yes I was administered the shot. Before this I had been using upwards of a gram a day IV for roughly 6 months straight. Not my longest or most intense bender but one with sufficient moment to warrant a horrendous withdrawal even under normal circumstances. Vivitrol is a month long extended release shot. Its activation takes less than 10 minutes. The tips of your receptors are like the bristles of a broom. When the opiates enter your brain they fit in like two broomsticks bristles to bristles meshing together. At the end of each bristle is a hook that locks them into place. During this forced withdrawal I swear I could feel each bristle being ripped apart as the naloxone did its work.

Within 5 minutes my vision goes from blurry to a pinpointed tunnel with this loud whirling sound enveloping my head. I hit the bed and begin vomiting this dark black bile. I do not remember much else of the first night other than brief moments of my 69 year old father falling asleep in my computer chair, worried sick, watching me with the phone in one hand ready to dial 911 and having to get up at 5 am for work. As much as an asshole he is, he took care of me and would drop everything he is doing for one of his kids. I took advantage of that, manipulating and stealing everything I could from that man.

It wasn't the first day or the second that was bad. The heat of withdrawal was never bad for me. Don't get me wrong, it is hell on earth. But I fear the lingering of withdrawal the worst. The milder symptoms. Being wide awake and dead tired kicking and tossing and turning while my bones ache and my skin crawls. Wanting to vomit at the thought of food or liquid but being so famished at the same time. In the mayhem of heavy withdrawal there is no time to think, no time to feel, in many ways its similar to the rush of heroin, I'm just not there in the moment. But the milder withdrawal, like being in the waiting room of some purgatory. That god forsaken waiting room. Waiting for what? For this to pass? Then what? Start life over again, knowing the cravings won't die down any time soon. Waiting to just do it all over again? By day 4 I had some mashed up strawberries with sugar and some Gatorade. By day 8 I was fine. By day 29 of the treatment, when it was time to get another shot, when the effects of the previous shot were wearing off, I ran away. I'd use, steal, lie and come home crying when out of resources only to do this all over again. I kept seeing that dark figure in those withdrawals. Never said a thing. Never did a thing. It stared and I whimpered.

This all occurred roughly 1 year after my previous report entitled 'All Roads Lead to the Same Dead End' I wrote that report in 2009 after being a few weeks clean thinking I was reflecting on a past chapter of my life that I had turned the page on. How naïve I was. I am writing this in 2018 about this snapshot of experiences that occurred shortly after writing that first report. It would be another 3 years until I would get clean. It would be a dozen treatment facilities, detoxes, a 2 year dance with smoking meth, psych wards and jails until I found myself living in my car in the parking lot of a hotel I had long since checked out of.

Today I sit here writing this with over 3 years clean. Time is meaningless though. The thought of heroin is like some blurred dream in a past lifetime. The lure it used to have, that sweet siren's song is gone, but in a different way. In attempts at getting clean in the past, heroin and its pull would either be hovering over me constantly or shut out of my life completely as I sit, white knuckled telling the world I am fine. Today I can dance with the lived experiences of what was once my world and not feel a thing other than a serene reflection of lessons learned. Maybe you're reading this high, waiting to get high, in morbid curiosity, in nostalgic longing, or out of sheer boredom. Maybe you're reading this as I once used to, desperately fantasizing of what once was and what could be, an attempt to vicariously live through others, wishing and wanting to be high and to be clean and for it all to just go away. It never just goes away. The built up veil that heroin use constructs is like a wave. It has to crash before it can return back out to sea. There is no escaping it. That mother I saw, that dark figure I witnessed, they were my own manifestations. The universe is all that matters now and my growing connection with it. The fire was always there, sometimes just an ember, sometimes just a lump of hot coal waiting to be reignited. It is here, small and I try to tend to it for if it goes out I may find myself back in that place or someplace darker still. There is always someplace darker, somewhere lonelier and somewhere far more sinister than we have experienced.

The monsters of the world pale in comparison to the ones we carry within our own hearts. We create our own reality. As long as you peddle negativity out to the universe you will continue to manifest your own personal purgatory. A customized waiting room equipped with stark white walls and sharp edged geometry for you to bash your brains in for eternity. As soon as you stop feeding the beast and begin to emanate love from your heart the game is won. An inkling of love can wash away the greatest fortresses of hate. If you are reading this as I use to read experience reports and are in a dark place, then this last bit is for you.

You are good enough. You haven't wasted any time, for all of life is just experience. You can do anything. You do not have to keep doing what you are doing. You are real. You are true at heart. You are strong. You are the universe.

Exp Year: 2011	ExpID: 111682
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 23
Published: Aug 19, 2020	Views: 4,719
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Naltrexone (338), Heroin (27) : Combinations (3), Medical Use (47), Addiction & Habituation (10), Various (28)