WHY

Remembering.

I have so many false starts to choose from. That time, warmed by lines of late afternoon sunshine, angling through the glass doors. Nighty on. Fringe slick to forehead with cold sweat. Curled on the couch. The patches of skin that touched the reddish woven fabric, worn in parts, screamed, crawling. It wasn't because of the couch, it was my skin, like a suit made of that scratchy wool, ill fitting, claustrophobic, no zips, you're trapped. You'd tear it off with your bare hands, if you could. It's a feeling I hope none of you ever have to experience. God, it's hard to describe.

Terror. It's like spiders under your T shirt, scuttling up the legs of your jeans. Big, hairy spiders, heading towards orifices. And then they're inside you, and there's nothing you can do. Well, there is one thing, one cure only. The antidote. And it's on your mind in neon and italics, flashing, glittering, seductive. The cock pushing between your thighs, hard, pressing against your wetness, almost in, the moment of foreplay where your mind goes blank red, you don't even exist, you're an animal and this is the reason you were born.

The self control it takes to last through this, it's heroic. It would be easier if you were doing it to save someone else.

Breathe. Run a bath, writhe in it. Pace, pace. Get back in bath, writhe more. Twitch covers on, off. Sometimes I can sleep for patches, my subconcious on a drug loop. Like a CD skipping. Spewing reasons into my mind to use. Nothing seems irrational. It's your heart saying do it. It's like breaking up with someone you love. Someone a phone call away, ready to hold you and make everything better. And even if you make it through the worst 4 days of your life, it doesn't end there. It really just begins.

Mourning the same as if a loved one had died. With an unfair twist... you can bring them back. It's not just your emotions grieving, each cell remembers, aching, stamped with need. Heroin has made me realize how inextricably linked physical and emotional pain are. I used to think of them as seperate entities. No wonder hate causes cancer.

I lasted a day without opiates, once after a methadone detox. All the emotions I'd avoided for the past year slammed into me. I opened the newspaper, on my lunchbreak. A small girl had been raped by her father and abused by her mother repeatedly through her childhood, investigators found her dead body emaciated and covered with cigarette burns. There are no words for what I felt then. There, on a bench on the busy street I sobbed. Messy, snotty sobs tearing at my lungs. I despised myself for feeling self-pity. I despised the world. I wanted to be a pebble on the ground or a leaf on a tree. I wanted to be nothing. The space that my body takes up, me-shaped, where ever I go, I wanted to empty it.

When people kill themselves it often makes those who loved them mad. Angry at what they think is selfishness. But it's not that, I understand now. When you feel that blackness, the emptiness like a black hole, you aren't thinking about family, or friends and how they feel. Death is calling your name and something inside you is answering. A magnetic force is pulling. Have you ever been caught in a rip at sea? Trying to swim back to shore, exhausted, choking on sea water. Panic building. But while you fight, with everything you have, there is that sneaking lullaby, sung from the bottom of the ocean, the temptation to give in, be taken by the waves, whooshed away. It used to be blamed on mermaids. I don't know if it's whispered in your ear, or if it comes from inside. But sometimes when a subway train comes and I see its front looming, that moment yells at me: DO IT! And then the moment has passed and I push through the doors and stand with everybody else. Expression blank like the strangers' faces on either side of me. Maybe we're all thinking the same thing. I know I'll never do it. Well, I don't think I ever would. It's just an option, like one more quarter in the slot machine, but not as bossy. The subway isn't demanding, it's just a reminder, like the robotic voice that calls from the video store.