Whole

A Story by TwentySixSS

A short story on the subject of addiction.

I slipped the needle into my vein smoothly. The shoelace wrapped around my forearm squeezed tightly against my flesh. I used my teeth to pull the makeshift tourniquet taut and pulled the plunger back ever so slightly, drawing out a sliver of blood. I imagined it mixing in with the dark rust coloured liquid. Swirling and shifting and dispersing. I dragged a deep breath into my lungs and slowly pushed down the plunger, watching it travel down the length of the tube. I slide the needle out, placed in neatly on my bedside table, swiftly rubbed the alcohol soaked cotton over my forearm and laid back against my headboard. My moves were rehearsed. Practiced. Ingrained. The soft, clean duvet caressed my skin.

I felt it at the back of my throat first. The dryness. My arms and legs became heavy and sunk into the bed as the surge of euphoria travelled up my body, eventually reaching my brain where it blanketed my mind. I felt my head roll to the side and let the darkness slide over my eyes.

I hadn’t always been a user. A drug addict. I hadn’t always ‘chased the dragon’. I was fairly new to all this. The veins on my arms were still usable. I hadn’t had to start injecting between my toes yet. That’s what the others did. No matter how tight they tied pipe or cloth around their forearms, they simply could not get their veins to pop, large, engorged and pulsing like mine. The very first time I used has been unintended. Well, unintended in the sense that I did intend to snort the glistening white lines of the porcelain club toilet a year ago. I just hadn’t intended to get addicted to anything. The joy I felt that first time was unlike anything I’d ever experienced. Alcohol simply had nothing on it. My skin prickled and shone, as sweat dripped down my back as I danced, and laughed and kissed that night. I had never felt the intensity of truly being alive until then. The feeling of being fully aware of everything and everyone around me. The looks, the laughs, the shocked faces, they meant nothing to me that night as I grinded and twirled and spun.

This was a feeling I was unaccustomed to. Feeling assured. Feeling awake. Most of my life had been spent being painfully aware of my own presence. My size. My awkwardness. I walked through life feeling too big for the spaces I inhabited. I was never fat, don’t misunderstand me. I was just to large, to oblong, to misshapen to smoothly fit into conversations, or rooms or parties. I was malformed on the inside. Few people would describe me this way though. I pretended well. I learnt over time the right key words and phrases needed to fit in, to slide in to those perfectly angled spaces that society created. Everyday I would squeeze and shove and press myself into the required shape. The cheerful co-worker. The comforting friend. The loving daughter and sister. I crushed, and broke and bent myself into a perfectly functional member of society. I got the job, the home, the car, the Knick Knacks on my windowsill. Anyone who walked through that door was confronted with a well-adjusted profile of a human being.

But the pieces never linked together in the right order for me. No matter how hard I crushed against them. The job, the car, the house, the dates. They were never able to fire of the magical sequence in my brain to unlock the combination to joy. I know that this is my own fault. I had no quantifiable reason to feel this way. I had had a good life. My family was typical, standard. Average. My childhood was happy, filled with the right books and the right shows. I was the problem you see. I never had that something special. You know what I’m talking about don’t know? That zest that some people have. That sparkle. A talent, an interest, a quirk. That something that sets that person apart from everyone else. That definable characteristic that makes them fully formed. That makes them whole.

I never had that something you see. I could read and write, and work and function. But I had little else. I had no passion, no extraordinary talent, no special zest or spark. I am that person you meet who almost immediately forget. That face you can’t quiet seem to place. The name that’s always just on the tip of your tongue. I learnt this early on. I adapted and accepted it. I learnt to agree with opinions and to mimic pleasantries. To laugh at jokes and to nod when spoken to. I skated by under the radar and I learnt to be okay with always looking in. To always be on the outside of the joke.

People noticed when I started using though. I became an outlier then. The centre of the conversation rather than being confirmed to the outskirts of it. Friends and family did not understand. Could not understand why me, a perfectly average twenty-six-year-old, would willing waltz into the dark, twisty world of drugs. Why I would choose to let the tentacles of addiction wrap themselves around me and pull me down, down, down into murky cold water, where I could no longer see sunlight reflecting on the surface. They wanted to help. They offered me advice, and wisdom and pamphlets on shiny well-oiled rehabilitation centres. The advice became more insistent when I lost my job. It became frenzied when the lights got switched off in my apartment.

As I sit here in my bedroom, enveloped in darkness, I can see the moonlight dancing softly against the curtains. Wind whistles softly through the hole in the window. I have cuts along my knees from crawling through the broken glass. This is not my home anymore. I could no longer afford the time, energy and money required to maintain the façade of a home. But I needed to be here for this. To be alone.

I feel the heroin burn through my veins. I feel it fill the gaps inside me. Smoothing out the gagged edges. Plastering over the rough hard corners until all that’s left is a complete person. As my heart beats frantically, and then stops, one last fleeting thought runs through my mind. I’m whole.