To forget

It's this time of day.
The sweaty minutes. Dripping cold and hot.
Don't look at certain things. Don't listen to others. Hold onto the railing, tight.
Stomach falling sickly. Food, another enemy.
So insanely impatiant. Yet carefully looking no further than this evening. The gaping void of life, arms wide open ahead of me. I catch sight of it sometimes, if I turn too slow. That's the scary part.
I'd found the cure- to everything. A happiness potion I have to forget.

Falling up

The reduction has started. I'd prefer to do it faster. I'm ready for tomorrow.
But the doctors look at me with these sharp eyes, cynical smiles. They've seen me before, in other people, failing people. They say it's fine to fuck up. I have to expect to. They remind me the statistics are on their side. But I know I won't, I say. They look bored, tired, slightly irritated. Like I'm an over-smiling born again Jehovah's Witness, door-knocking on a Saturday morning.

The fastest the doc will drop me is 5mgs a week- until I hit 40mgs. Then, they switch me from methadone to bup, for a home detox with a nurse checking in, daily.

I'm on 90mgs now. Three days ago I was on 95. This is supposedly the easy part.
Around 70mgs, she expects me to be "a mess". Their faith in me is just amazing.

The new drug

Home-home-home

I didn't realize, at all, but I was hungry. Starving. There was, is, an absence of something I crave. I filled it up with drugs, filled up with work, filled it up with worry and love for someone who kicked me in the face over and over. Anything, to forget. Good distractions. They did their job. But it was like feeding a monster, a greedy monsterous baby that never got full, barely even swallowed, until I was running back and forth to it, and around and around, and the more it had, the more it needed.

It's good to hear the waves on the rocks. The streaming pink of the sinking sun. God-like beams and shafts of gold through the clouds. The wind here, it blows right into my chest, and it fills up the hollow parts, every nook and cranny. It's so beautiful, it's the warm-blanket-around-the-shoulders feeling, that old hug of heroin- without the shadows.

I think I'm going to be okay.

Weightless

Sun on my back. I'm okay kiddies.
10 days to home. And the methadone detox. Swimming with the dolphins, lounging in the shady, fern filled courtyard, the smell of flowers and sea in my nose. I have these big aviator sunglasses. They look normal from the outside. But through them, the world looks sunny. Happy. I call them my therapy glasses. They take the edge of the icy blue sky here, razoring my nerves away. Anxious mornings. Don't like waking up. Unemployed on methadone, I could sleep to four pm and go to bed again at ten. I want to. I wish. The nightmares have gone. Drugs too. Heroin once, my first day back. Two fucked up attempts at coke, fumbling through the scar tissue, blood splattered floor, heart in my throat. It makes me want to vomit. Last time I called him, the mafia-oso dealer, pseudo hot, lanky, young, increasingly flirtatious, cloying, I waited ten minutes. There, on the street corner. Shivering. Nauseous with anticipation. Hopping one foot to another. Men driving slowly, the way they always do, thinking I'm a hooker. I just try not to look at them. He was a minute late. The nausea deepened. The hate thickened, like something big and heavy deep in my stomach. A taxi had stopped at the lights. So I just ran to it. Shaking still, jumped in. Went to the pharmacy. Handed over my dollar, gulped down my small bottle of methadone and tang.
Trying not to think of him waiting there, at the corner. In his big expensive car. Beating the steering wheel with his fist. Swearing at me in Italian. I don't know why, or how, I left like that. I'd always wanted to, in the past, waiting for dealers. Never had the guts. I know how angry they get. I know he'll hang up on me, if I was cheeky enough to try and call him again. But just maybe, I don't care.