a story about going over the edge

[Ilsa]

this started as a blog, but i thought i'd make it a thread, just so anyone trying to kick can more easily find it, just in case it might help somehow (one never know). I plan on including, later in this post, the journal entries of SWIM at the one year anniversary of leaving what she calls, both literally and ironically, the 'junkie paradise' : money, free room and board, free drugs and rigs. the following is a very brief description of swim's experience with the proverbial edge, and going over it.

A little background may be helpful here: swim lived with two friends, js and jw, for a few months, immediately before moving two states up from florida, to get out of the madness.


she didn't want to leave, or at least she didn't want to quit shooting coke and heroin everyday. she had nothing left in florida and felt herself slowly losing her mind. Among daily periods of intermittent cocaine psychosis (on her part, a roommates part, or most commonly, on everyone's respective parts), flying down the interstate at ungodly speeds on a heroin run, and going through withdrawals when the supply failed, she was gettin even more tired than she was when it all started.

Although swim has used consistently over the years, she has never had a problem with dependency, even shooting opiates just occasionally. this gave her a sense of false security over time. she was on an antidepressant (effexor), and decided to taper off when she lost her grad school health insurance when she had dropped out of the phd program she was in after realizing she hated the research she was doing. thus, the transition from years of functional use to full-blown addiction.

she went from shooting 80-160 mgs oxycodone a month to shooting a few times a week. she started snorting coke regularly (something she did occasionally in the past) as well, so it was a small step to starting to shoot coke. even after a scary incident with cotton fever, her use escalated. She moved in with two friends (jw and js) that had money, as she had long ago sublet her apartment and moved in with a boyfriend, who later became violent, and she needed to get out of there quickly. swim and js were sort of involved and both he and jw wanted a girl around, so swim was in. Her first night at the new place (this is the junkie paradise, mentioned earlier), js walked in with a box of 100 needles and two eightballs. the following afternoon, she went with jw to get a couple grams of heroin. they took the motorcycle and it was a fairly long ride, even at 150 mph, so on the way back from the dealer's they (and this fast became a ritual) would stop at a gas station and have a hit. the rides back were always so fast and soft and noddy and gorgeous. in the evening and through the night, we would continue to shoot coke and the odd speedball, talking about nothing and everything and all the plans that junkies make while high that never come to fruition. it was fun, it was a chemically induced love and camaraderie. it was also insane: jw, much as swim cared abut him, got the worst of the paranoia and psychosis on coke and often couldn't stop talking about shadow people and even other junkies who had tried to break into the house, the usual paranoia. it went on for days, even weeks when the coke was flowing...js had millions in the bank.


the pivotal moment, the one when she knew she had to get out, was in the midst of one of js' endless paranoid rants. she saw herself in a mirror the; emaciation was sickeningly obvious in her face and arms, which were streaked with track marks; she thought, "i can't do it anymore." simple statement, but that was it. she was gone within the next two weeks. the last night she spent ping-ponging (this was their description of taking a coke shot, then getting up to go do some random thing and literally walking, ping-pong-style, bumping into either wall of the hallway, to the other end of the house). she somehow drove home, armed with a last rig, filled with precious heroin. she quickly discovered that the true junkie lifestyle was not what she had had in florida--it was desperation and destitution. once there, she used a small stockpile of methadone to get through withdrawals. she would take 10 m gs at first to ward off the dopesickness and foufn that she could gradually use less and less to keep from getting sick. she had a few very paiful sleepless weeks, but all in all, this was one of the milder wd's she's been through (fortunate since her parents just thought she looked so bad because of effexor wd's, and never saw the tracks, obviously). she continued shooting coke for a few months, but gradually tapered off and finally quit altogether about 8 months ago.

she managed to transfer her grad school credits to the university here and started working on environmental science, which she's much happier with.


however, this one period of abuse still haunts. she would not trade that experience for anything...this whole other abyss of existence that is such heaven and such hell all at once. as swim said to me, more than once, "we all thought we had it so figured out...and we did, provided that the eventual o.d. occurred, and none of us were left to pick up the pieces of our self-destroyed lives. but it never happened like that, as much as i wanted to od, it just didn't happen. i had to pick up the pieces of my life myself." a year later, swim and i are in a better place, but, like a tapestry, we have this intricate, sometimes beautiful picture on the front, yet a look behind reveals the masses of tangled, chaotic threads that comprise the seemingly well-ordered picture.

there aren't many entries, but they are part of an on-going story (and these are all swim's entries):

"i remember when we were withdrawing for two days straight, after a two week heroin bender....js was out on some crazy crack binge and we had no access to the money. you (js) were too sick to get up, even if we'd had $500 and a dealer next door anyway. there was no greater relief than when jw finally came home and he and i went to get a few 80 mg oxycondone's. you get straight, then hit me with one (80 mgs)....going from puking and diarrhea and shaking and twitching to the soft, sweet, opiate euphoria was the most beautiful thing in the world right then...."

"i remember one night in jekyllville (having run out of coke and fiending for more)...js was playing with this hunting knife, scheming, but not many dealers pick up the phone at 4am. abruptly, js stabbed the knofe into the arm of the recliner in which he was sitting and said "well fuck all then." i found this hysterical...you (jw) did as well and we both started giggling incontrollable at the insanity of it all..."

"there was another night, just before we ran out of heroin, knowing it was dry, knowingn the wd's were coming. you (jw)were wandering around, cradling, yes cradling, a bottle of whiskey under one arm and belting out random rock ballads, drunk as hell...the wd's started teh next morning..."

background on the following entry: js had been a coke addict for many years, and was suffering congestive heart failure, one of the reasons they wanted me to move in, as he went to the hospital about once monthly for difficulty breathing and/or heart attack (i know this sounds implausible, but these people were life-long, hardcore addicts. health is not a concern.)
"i left to save my sanity, but also for more cowardly reasons: i didn't want to see js die. he was trying to od, trying to die. we all were, but he was closest to it. i hoped every shot wold be the one that stopped my breathing, or caused a heart attack. but i didn't want to see it happen to someone else..."

a couple of swim's last entries, written mostly to js


"i remember the night we decided, at 3 am, to ride the 45 minutes south for a gram of heroin. we stopped, as usual, to take a hit for the ride back on the motorcycle. it was a clear, beautiful night. the roads were deserted, just us, flying as fast as the ninja would go down the darkened roads, laughing to the wind, you telling me to hold on to you more tightly, this was our time. no, this was US. those moments were the ones i don't want to forget, and they were painfully rare....we nearly hated one another at the end, right before i left.
we helped each other, then helped each other destroy ourselves. our junkie paradise was great when it was great, but it was far more fragile and percarious than we ever knew, or cared to acknowledge."

"i remember, when i moved in, you told me that i was going to get higher than i'd ever been, every day. that my only job was to stay alive. i laughed then, but in retrospect, i see the deadly truth in those words."

it was an insane, wonderful, miserable time...only after i left did i realize just how close i had come on several occasions, to seriously fucking myself up. i realized that it all inevitably come down to desperation, deception, self-abuse and insanity.



the point i am at now is restructuring my life. i've spent so many years wasted that i've forgotten how to go out and DO stuff. i've been going to the mountains, doing some photography, and meditating occasionally, but i need to me doing more, esp in terms of learning all the stuff i'm interested in outside my field. an issue with chronic back pain has actually really helped swim get past opiate cravings, oddly enough, as the pain seems to 'use up' the meds and swim doesnt' et the high. call her deconditioned i guess. anyway, this post is one part of a story that swim's needed to get out for awhile. any thoughts, criticisms, suggestions, etc. are welcome.

namaste

Reputation Comments on this post:

Its sound all so familiar to swim..