CW SH, Substance Abuse
The sudden, breathless shudder.
The all consuming shock as the soft tissue inside my face is violated by shattered crystals of caustic chemicals.
In an instant I am present.
In an instant the turbulent, indistinct, confounding bewilderment of my subdued sense of personhood is extinguished.
There is only pain, and the urgent, irrepressible urge to react, to get through that moment.
Complexity and nuance are impossible.
I am simply the survival of that pain, frozen in time.
I know soon there will be so much more, some of it unreplicatable in its unique beauty, some of it unrelentingly despair inducing, always however there is the reassuring and comforting routine. An emotional rehearsal. The grief is as important as the euphoria.
The blade is different, I feel fear and trepidation before, but once I am calm there is no pain. I wait expectantly for the blood, the delay itself; as the vivid red begins to playfully peek out like a hidden gift, is more painful than the act. Impatiently I pull at the wound, encouraging it to release and yield.
There is a great deal of manual dexterity and technique to properly preparing a crystalline compound to snort it. I am adept at this, I've had more than a decade of regular practice.
The finer the particles the better the adherence to the surface area of the sinuses.
The better bioavailability.
The greater the pain.
The tiny shards, invisibly sharp to the naked eye like snowflakes, can more economically eviscerate the soft tissue and begin dissolving into the blood vessels, melting away the flesh in the process.
If you do this irregularly, it will heal.
I do not.
They do their work, bewitching my neurochemical balance with a siren song of disingenuous satisfaction, peace, safety and healing.
To arrange it neatly in appropriate doses, to do this in a time efficient manner as the frequency and size of the doses increases, to do it with blurred vision, shaking hands and building paranoia pulling your attention away.
This takes skill.
I am clumsy with the blade. It is unfamiliar to me, I feel like I'm trying to learn to paint or draw.
The angle of approach, the specific depth of that part of my body, the necessary pressure to achieve the correct result.
The depth of the wound varies too much, the lack of blood in a particular stroke frustrates me and builds the tension, the insistence of the urge. There is no sense of adept familiarity as I drag it across my flesh.
Perhaps one day it will be as routine as cutting out a line, nearly always neatly uniform and infinitely replicable, regardless of my level of impairment.
Undeniably I find the visual result captivating, arresting, erotic. To become a canvas is a special thing.
Whenever I have attempted to learn to draw before, the uncertainty of where to start has made me hesitant.
I have no such hesitation when I work on this medium, it feels natural.
The key to developing any skill is repetition.
Sucking at something is the first step to being kind of good at it.
While others studied the blade, I studied the debit card.
