“Here and now I’m gone; there and far beyond…”

Pavlov would’ve been proud.

Every time I’d smell what nurses call a “flush” (a neutral liquid injected into IV’s to clear them for a subsequent drug treatment through the same passage), I would get excited.

See, my body and mind had already connected the dots from the flush to the dose of Dilaudid they’d give me.

Dilaudid is a powerful narcotic painkiller.

And I was in love.

 

 

I’d push myself to activity until the suffering became almost unbearable.

Then I’d call for a hit.

The sensation was unforgettable.

 

 

The flow of it into my arm.

The almost instantaneous feeling of falling in my abdomen.

Followed quickly by a high I’d never before experienced.

 

 

I’d lay in the dark.

No light.

No sound.

Just the drug.

And the heights to which it would carry me.

Oh, yes.

I was in love.

 

 

Months later, when I’d visited my mother’s grave, I walked [as I always did] a few more feet.

To the graveside of my cousin.

Who’d overdosed [listed as “accidental”, though most believed it intentional] on heroin at the age of 29.

A brilliant, handsome young man that had shined in both school and at work.

Yet was possessed by demons of the self that few ever understood.

 

 

It was then I realized drugs do not kill because they are “bad”.

They kill because they break the chains that bind us to this life.

And many of us, for reasons good or ill, have less an attachment to it than others.

 

 

 

 

Ω