Hopping the Wagon: Day 5

Tomorrow arrives so slowly when you want the world to end. I think that dying must be like time torture. But I don't want the world to end, just this brief part of it to pass. Though I suppose picking and choosing what I like best and what I want to ignore got me here in the first place.

I'm sweating. For the second time in four days heroin is coming out my body. It's too much. It's too exhausting. Heroin cannot be a halfway house. One must either do it all the time or not at all. Trying to straddle some middle road is eternal damnation. No junkie can be happy having to economise like that, it's the worst thing in the world.

My friend Katy once told her imaginary drug counsellor that the thing that would make her better was two £20 baggies a day. If the system could give her that she'd be fine. Her reasoning was correct but two bags would only have helped her for a time and then she'd have needed three. But what she was saying was that she wanted some kind of predictability, some insurance policy that allowed her to plan and regain her proper self and emotions. Living for the giro cheque and begging to maybe get a bag every two or three days was tearing her apart.

A week later, she was tracked down and bashed up by some embittered ex-lover, her face smashed open on the sink in her bedsit. I found her wandering down Uxbridge Road with glazed black eyes and a split lip. People were veering and staggering out her way. It was like she was war and famine and disease and was there for the kids. She told me that she wanted to die, that she needed a fix. I said "I'll put you in for a fix." She hugged me and cried and then she was the happiest girl in town.

Katy died the next day - heroin overdose. That's what the street corner said anyway. I didn't really mourn her, I didn't know how to mourn someone like that. I suppose you do it with a tourniquet and a spoon and an extra strong hit. I don't know. Anyway, as usual,  when street corners speak they speak a load of bollocks. A year later I found Katy sitting outside a courthouse rolling a cigarette and making little sketches. She was up on heroin possession and supply charges. That's how she took what she needed from the system. And then they took it back. She got two years and I never saw her again.

All these people that pass by are history. I remember them like that, like their faces represent a certain amount of time or a season or a sky. Their words and clothes and actions define a time. We're all history, that's for sure.

Tomorrow is Day 6. Not really but for us it is. I must catch up on my emails and mop the floor. Nothing too exciting there, but once when I was mopping the floor I found a small chunk of heroin. It must have shot off from a larger rock and sat there for god knows how long. Since then I don't mind soaping the tiles... the dishes, though, forget it... there's absolutely no future in washing dishes.

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