It hurts when your habits don’t ignite you anymore. I remember those long nights that I lived for; the fizzy bubbles: “it’s really pure powder y’know" and the fair weathered-out fiends I’ve shared it all with so many times. It should be so good. It used to be like painting a magical picture with a kaleidoscope of colour. But now the only oil left is brown, and the canvas is not blank, it’s beige.
Its 2am and I’ve had a gram already, my heart's going to that place where I need to keep checking it’s still working. My mind is splintered like a mirror dropped from a great height, and the only way I’m able to speak is by picking up all the pieces and putting them back together again.
What I mean is I have to think of a topic, then choose a sentence in its full entirety, memorise it and then say it to the other person, who is not even listening. If I try to speak off the cuff then only half murmurs come out, or sentences that have no meaning or relation to who I really am. There’s a dull girl whose not putting her coke out quick enough, sat far too close to me:
“When I was 15, my dad's friend used to touch my tits when my dad wasn’t looking. One time he got me so drunk on Twenty Twenty and asked if he could touch my sports bra. He even fingered me once. Me and you are just like soul sisters. Do you believe in karma? I’m getting Virgo vibes from you. I get along with Virgo's. Got another note, this one's got blood on it”.
My inner voice says: “Go Fuck Yourself” but there’s still half a gram in her hand and I’m too Red-Stripe wiped to go cash point and get more. I nod and pass her a fiver that looks like it's been through the wash since the seventies, it's impossible to roll right.
This girl doesn’t stop mouthing shite, and is clearly at the beginning of her cocaine lifecycle. She’s yet to find herself in the dip where the highs flatten and communication is stunted to a stale story, interspersed with drawn-out twitchy silences.
I have no more words. I have become an incessant nodding entity with lips pursed into a frozen formula.
I know this feeling, I have experienced it many a time and weirdly this picture of myself never arises when it seems like a grand idea to call-in the first gram.
A room full of dry mouth. A head without a nose, dead-doll eyes; pulling my hair out from my fringe in a jagged motion, I’m trying to hide my face. Staring at my phone, scrolling and scratching for something. I’m lost, lonely and desperately want to merge with someone, but it’s only possible to be alone right now.
I’m in that half-world, half-light where nothing is good enough. No gallant prince has found me yet, and if they did get close-in I would get up and move to another co-ordinate of this day-party hell.
The light is coming up and I see this place doesn’t have any curtains. Wrinkles of fear are visible in the corners of my pasty mouth.
A cold-sore is being born on my upper lip, time is running out. There’s one guy on the make but his booze has run out and he doesn’t look as good as when I kissed him earlier.
In fact he looks way more impotent than earlier. I became interested in him at my chemical peak when he got out his article that was published in The Scotsman on July 23rd 2004. He’s a writer but hasn’t written anything since then.
On wondering whether to stay or face the daylight and cold I think of his article and feel shame about my superficiality four hours earlier. I think of his article with its languish, arrogant language and snobbish word-play, that’s very much at odds with his louche, lazy personality.
Good writing is architecture, not interior decoration.
I flinch as I see myself in this man clutching his long-gone article; a thing to desperately hug on to in hope it’ll reveal something to others about an original intelligence and depth of being. Something that cannot be mustered in these chemical days.
It’s time to face my insides and go outside. I ask the host/lapsed writer to borrow a pair of “thick, long socks and a hoodie”. He asks me if I want to stay over and I can see the shame of his article party-trick in his clinging pinned eyes. I want to console him and tell him we’ve all had a Please Love Me Article Moment, but he smells stale and I can feel my cold-sore coming between us.
I mind-read him and intuit he’s wondering whether I had it when we kissed. I think to tell him: “don’t worry it came up only one hour ago, and we kissed four hours ago” but he seems like an utter stranger now, and such words would make the gulf between us even more murky.
Instead I say: “Thanks for a great night, see you around Je….” I forget who is and why we’re here.
All I do know is that I recognise his longing to be bigger, alive, yet feeling less than the finished article.