The Pitfalls of a Weakened Will

Some of us had no idea if an end to the cycle was even possible while it still coursed our veins.

Elm Street Horror

Cutting straight to the point as straight as cutting to a point could be. I slipped from somewhere in the average ranges to near insanity. Days were spent barely conscious yet awake and moving about. Sometimes my skin would burn, my body reeked like sewage, the inside of my mouth would be covered in mini cuts, and I was nearly positive that my heart and my lungs had been taking excessive breaks from work. The most heinous seal of the slow horrifying transformation was the dilapidation of my core muscles and the flabby mass that now hung where a once flatly formed tummy had been. Surely my eyes were also sunk in some, but it varied from using to using how much. Trademarked battle flags for the pirated ship that was my life to fly on it's way to greater plunder.

Generically the scene started in a smoke or fume filled living room among a selection of either very well organized or carelessly piled belongings and chairs. The chairs were rarely very comfortable and could be assumed as being something from a garbage can as well. The carpets were always stained with drinks and paints and sometimes animal urine in these dwellings. Nobody seems to really like to clean up anything when they have the more pressing matter to attend to of twisting a pipe of one sort or another, and alternatively snorting substances.

The substance was called Juke, Ickshe, Shit, Dope, Crank, Meth, Crack, and Powder most frequently, although, it has other names. Broken light bulbs and pyrex glass tubes were the preferred vessel for its' partaking. For anyone outside the active pursuit of this addiction an easy reasoning to support wanting the stuff wasn't clearly found. The cravings for these pebbles of frozen chemical that tasted ranging from perfume to what I imagine licking a dog's ass would taste like are what drew most of the consumers in. They longed for the breath of vaporized amphetamine starting at their first slight anxiety for the day and never ending until unconscious or partaking. Some of them even preferred it over oxygen.

The effects were like the opposite of encountering Freddy Kreuger, instead of seeing a monster in your dreams that kills you and your closest associates the user lives a waking nightmare. The first night awake never feels overwhelming really. People would just babble on in this time about whatever fluttered through their chemically flushed brainwaves and sometimes even enjoyed themselves doing it. The next day would feel oppressive if it was hot at all and the intoxicated were out in the heat. The light was appearing too bright because of the dilation of their eyes. Not that it was ever really taken as a warning sign like it should have been, the symptoms were typically treated by self medicating as if the only solution for any kind of ill happening was more dope. The repetition of the use compounded for those with enough to fuel it on and became a routine daily activity during the second evening.

This is where hallucinations start coming into play with the already deathly feel of ingesting this poison and fatigue. The triple threat to the system made people lose focus on their surroundings or intensely focus their sight on a point somewhere in front of them that they would forget why they were looking at somewhere along the way. This lack of concentration would cause mumbling masses of miscommunication to jumble into the environment. Some would get irate over another not hearing and responding to them, others would just peacefully check out of being in their present mind and explore some mental revelry. By this point in the morning of day two everyone still in on the supply would be aching from sitting in awkward positions for hours while zoned out or from standing or pacing around for far too long. This was just the first leg of the misery to come for anybody brave enough and insane enough to trip into the next days without sleep.

Unintelligible babble foamed out of zombie like corpses mulling about to their business come the next morning. The sun again too bright, hallucinations of all sorts of creatures rampantly feeding off the beliefs of the recipient becomes a stuttered topic of discussion infrequently, everyone appears to be slouching their posture severely, and, no matter how many times the individual attempts to collect their senses to do something, nothing gets accomplished. These people impair themselves and make believe that they enjoy it. Some of them would still drive cars around in this state.

By the next day, anybody still suffering the inability to have sleep or foolishly still sucking on the pipes should have been classified as subhuman beings. Motor skills were defunct and tremors shook the body when a muscle was stressed even a little, their mouths would slack to the sides sometimes seeping drool and their entire build would be sore, joints creaking, muscles deflating and drooping due to the inability the body possessed to repair the cells dissolved in acids built up from fidgeting or attempts at working. The users head throbbed and micro napping begins to wreak havoc on the conscious.

The blackouts made it impossible to track time or even walk completely to the next room without forgetting where one was going. The middle of this fourth day, the people hard enough or moronic enough to still be going at it had no idea what they were eating, saying, writing, watching, doing in intervals ranging from a second to hours and back to a handful of seconds again. They fought with sleep and jolted awake after each of the blackouts intent on continuing to damage themselves. This happens for what feels like entire days to the user before their brain eventually shuts them down and forces a deep heavy sleep on their system which could potentially last for days. The only real con about the shut down was that when you wake again the cravings typically take back over and bend a person's will into repeating the process.

Some of us had no idea if an end to the cycle was even possible while it still coursed our veins. The only solution was to get more and more and more and more. The lucid realization of the terrible reality we were actually living while we thought that we were being somehow above a sober life or enlightened in a way was possibly the only moment that needed to be came to by these users for them to seek new habits. The problem with this being that for most of the dope fiends this moment never happened.