When You Can't Go Forward And You Can't Go Back

Night Of 1000 Spirits

Ellie was a good friend of mine, she shepherded me through one of the darkest periods of my life, though it was me who in the end pulled myself out into the light. She did something very important for me throughout that time, she continued to think of me as a good person. This was something which I was beginning to doubt as other friends gave me up as a lost cause.

For one thing I was not the hapless victim of my drug addiction, but had gone into it knowingly, enthusiastically, championing the cause of chemical anaesthetisation or so it seemed. I was not a hard luck case escaping a cruel world of despair, though thats what my life was fast turning into. Rather, I was a first year politics student with good grades, money, an effervescent mind and confidence. Life had heaped up a double portion of good times on my plate, and I had no sooner sat down to eat than I had thrown the whole lot away.

I was on a rollercoaster of a relationship with Eva, a German student with a wicked look in her eye and a fierce mind. I suppose she would not mind me saying that we had some of the best sex of my life (I think actually she would gain great satisfaction in reading these lines). She was a temptation all right, I was the dominant one but my body was very much in thrall to hers. Not only that but she stirred up something quite scary inside me, a desire that had perhaps always been there, to be the kingpin, to be the boss, the one that everyone feared and respected, the one with all the power. We kept pushing each other to be more and more extreme, to pull down and break our boundaries, to say anything, to do anything. So when these white lines came along, from a drug dealer on campus whose flat we frequented, we didn't think twice. We'd already got a bad case of Moreism. More extreme, more pleasurable, more sexy, more dangerous. 

At first the stuff seemed rather innocent, it was legal and uncut and we got it through friends. It was called Mephedrone. We called it drone, never Miaow Miaow. The popularisation of that name made me think a lot of children took it because it was so easy to get hold of. 

Four months later and I was taking drone every day, most often alone. I didn't sleep more than one night a week. My body that had been sleek and muscular when I met Eva had become weak and malnourished. We'd broken up, she turned out to be rather cold but I missed her. In some ways I'd been under her spell, as she'd been under mine, now that it had broken I had a lot of regrets. I'd lent her a rather large amount of money which I didn't think I'd ever get back. This tormented me, because even though I'd volunteered the cash I couldn't get the thought out of my mind that she'd screwed me over. The sudden withdrawal of sex had left me with the sort of painful, lingering horniness that made life not seem worth living and so I self-medicated. And because of the drugs I never could concentrate on my work, the subject I'd been so brilliant at and read up on so vigorously and written essays so enthusiastically, spoken about in seminars with such poise and knowledge, a subject that I'd enjoyed immensely while I was good at it, now seemed useless and distant from my life. People had begun to see me as a sort of basket case, a strange paranoid man, cut off from human company. 

My friend and flatmate Jorgen was sticking by me, though. But it was Ellie who provided the support that I needed to get through. One day we were talking animatedly out by the lake and a cloud passed over the sun, I took this as a sign that I could not be friends with her any more and told her so. The next day I called her up, apologising profusely, and she forgave me.

That's how my mind worked then. Some might say I was losing touch with reality, while others might say I was coming into contact with another reality, one that I did not yet understand. What happened next was this:

One sunny day I was taking drone alone in my room. I had convinced myself that just sitting there in sunlit perfection was all I never needed, I could maintain this equilibrium forever without needing another line. But soon enough I thought, 'well one more won't hurt, but thats the last one for now.' This pattern repeated itself most days and most nights.