PURE HEROIN

XXIV.

24| Pure Heroin | Epilogue

TO: Evelyn Mctier

FROM: Exodus

MAILING ADDRESS: Some where far, or maybe close

Dear Eve,

I thought of you today.

I thought of the day before first grade, when we decided that bubble gum was good for hair accessory and my mom used an entire jar of peanut butter to get it out of our hair. I remember we went to school smelling like Jifs for two weeks straight.

I thought of our first fight in tenth grade over Damien Fisher. The boy with the hazel eyes and the baseball cap that was always twisted backwards. He was danger in itself. With lips that tasted like purple jellybeans, created butterflies in our stomachs and possible of destroying friendships.

I thought of that day in Shell City. High off our asses on MDMA and Methadone. I don't actually recall much of that day only that we woke up in a strange place and my left shoe and half your hair was missing.

I thought of Paris, in the Balenciga Hotel where I had my first nose bleed. Snorting four fat lines of crystal meth up one nostril hadn't been the smartest idea. I remember you panicking because my nose had turned into a seemingly never ending bloody geyser. We used to laugh about it afterwards, how we'd started praying. We hadn't prayed in years.

I thought about the day I found you.

I knew in my heart that something was wrong. You always called me at exactly five-thirty in the morning, every morning if we were not together. I hated it, but you loved to watch the sunrise; I never understood your obsession with it, or with me watching it with you.

I used to imagine that it was only remembering your unhappiness, dissatisfaction with your life, that spurred you to take the knife from the kitchen drawer. Holding it so tightly in your fist, on the bed, naked to no purpose except that that was how you came into the world and how you thought your best moments in the world had been spent.

I imagined you gazing at the clock at five-twenty eight, looking out the window and counting down the moments. Holding the knife so, moving up your chest so that it brushed skin with each second. Slowly, so that it slid like love between your ribs and at five- thirty you plunged it into that stupidly pumping muscle in your chest that kept you hurting. That place no matter how much drugs you took could never fix.

I imagined in your last breaths you watched the peeking light of dawn and a tear fell from your eye. You had become another one of the twinkling stars that fade with the rising sun. Only, you were gone forever.

When I'd went over to your flat and found you, body washed in sunlight, I almost thought you a sleeping goddess. Until I noticed the blood, the knife dangling from your lifeless fingertips. In the midst of the sound of my own gut wrenching screams I remember feeling like I to had died with you.

Sitting there clutching your head in my lap I realized that there was such a thing as best friend soulmates. Our souls were so intertwined that if one was to disconnect the other would completely self destruct. And in that moment, I realized how much I actually depended on you.

It was a fact that had become the focus of my entire life, a whisper in my heartbeat, a permanent, insidious presence that punctuated my every breath. I couldn't escape it, that persistent voice, lingering in the blood pulsing through my veins. It said only one thing, over and over, a repetition of inescapable anguish, the knowledge of a thing that could never be undone.

Evelyn is dead.

If I didn't consider myself addicted to drugs then, then I was definitely hooked after you died. I was completely torn on the inside. I was angry, hurt but mostly confused. We told each other everything, I thought I knew you.

I wondered how well can we really know another person? People can be in our lives for years -- they can fill our lives. But all you really know of them are the stories they tell you. And then they die. They always leave a mystery behind.

I had stopped dancing. Drugs had become your replacement to me. When times were hard, it encased me in a little cotton-wool house and nothing hurt anymore. If I hadn't put in the work to become truly mindful, it's very easy to relapse.

We know what heroin, crack, LSD, ketamine feels like, even twenty or thirty years after a hit. The memory of that wonderful warm feeling remains.

Opiates are especially manipulative, because you get outside of your consciousness. Fears you didn't know you had, suddenly vanish. Though the experience of a drug is a romantic and nostalgic feeling,

addiction is not.

It's ugly and selfish, because it is so bodily. It is both metaphorical and biological, it is hunger for emotion, and chemical alteration. It is almost impossible to explain to someone who has never done drugs. I still have vague thoughts that in years to come, growing old with drugs wouldn't be such a bad way to fade out of this life. But those thoughts are emanating from my 'addict brain' not my rational brain.

I'm trying, but sometimes I'm terrified I'll relapse again. And I always wonder what will happen then, will I end up where ever you are?

I met someone, (and I'm sure it's your doing)I taste forever when I kiss him and it scares me. Forever could mean so many different things. It was always changing, it was twenty minutes, or a hundred years, or just this instant, or any instant I wished would last and last. But there was only one truth about forever that really mattered, and that was this:

it was happening.

I like to think that you've placed new people in my path, not has a replacement but sometimes I swear I see a little of you in all of them.

You have been dead for over two years now. I can't say it has been easy learning to live without you. Heading into year three, I can say I have started to make real progress. I can talk about your death without crying. I can look people in the eye and tell them how you died. And now I finally feel like I can be honest with you.

Okay, not with you per se, but I can be honest with myself about you.

We figure out what death means when we're born, practically, and we still live our whole lives in some kind of weird denial about it. But I've come to terms with the fact that I will never see you again. I used to look for you everywhere, hoping that you were watching over me and sending me signs. But I don't need you to linger anymore. I am finally at ease with your passing. And I know I'll see you again, someday, in another life perhaps. So this is hardly a goodbye.

Love always,
Ex