On the heels of my last post, “beautiful mess,” I owe it to myself, my family, my friends and my readers to continue opening up about my life. If I were to be asked, right now, what was most important to me in life, what I held sacred or get most enjoyment out of, I would have an answer without hesitation: crystal meth. A beautiful mess.

Crystal energizes me. It gives me purpose. It provides direction. It buffers me from the cares of the world. It makes the world seem OK again. It motivates me. It eases my pain. It enables me to be sexual. It lowers my inhibitions. When the world just doesn’t seem to care, tweak is there. And, lest we forget, with tweak comes Body by Tina. It’s a part of the package deal. Diet pills imitate, at best, what crystal does to the body. A rush of endorphins lurch you into fight-or-flight mode, and the digestive process shuts down to conserve your body’s energy for core functions, so there is no desire to eat. It’s a weekend diet, or, in my case, it’s a lifestyle.

What happens when you start to crash? Paranoia, delusions, exhaustion, emotional lability … all things that can be avoided by simply taking another hit and keeping the run going. Why bother coming down? Staying up for two weeks at a time has become normal. Eating is a chore at best, voluntary masochism at the worst. The body simply does not want the food. Applesauce has, quite literally, saved my life, with crushed-up multivitamins mixed in to replenish my system.

All pleasure aside, I remain addicted because the addiction fills a need. I must forget what has happened. I must recover and move on. My memories must be so covered up and cloudy that they cease to exist at all. If the good goes out with the bad, c’est la vie.

“I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom.”
―Edgar Allan Poe

The question is not what I like about crystal. Rather, to paraphrase Janet Jackson, what has it done for me lately? It has broken up my relationships, caused me to lose my friendships, gotten me kicked out of my house, made me homeless, put me into the psych ward and forced me into rehab. Rehab ended six months ago. I remain legally “homeless,” though housed in an SRO (city-run converted hotel rooms in old buildings), I remain on state disability and I remain addicted.

Just one more hit.

One more drug.

One last time.

Because tomorrow it will all be different. Tomorrow I will wake up and the world will make sense again. Tomorrow I will understand why I’ve been raped and abused, and I will accept that I can never be the same again. And tomorrow I will take back control of my life.

“I admire addicts. In a world where everybody is waiting for some blind, random disaster or some sudden disease, the addict has the comfort of knowing what will most likely wait for him down the road. He’s taken some control over his ultimate fate, and his addiction keeps the cause of his death from being a total surprise.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

But for now, for tonight, tomorrow is so far off. I can keep my cloudy dreams, my tweaker body, my energy, ambition and lust for life … and yes, of course, I can have another hit. Tomorrow never comes.