He became a compound so potent, so exquisitely tailored to my broken receptors, that nothing else registered.
This is not confession. This is an autopsy of my nervous system, written from the wreckage of a relapse I never touched. The drug wasn’t in a baggie or a syringe, and I never held it in my hand. It was synthesised inside me. The drug was him. Not even him as a man, but the chemical portrait my brain painted from his skin, his warmth, his absence, his refusal. I never needed a needle, because my marrow was the lab. My capillaries, the distribution network. My bloodstream the delivery system. My trauma the architect. My childhood wounds, the ruthless chemists. My attachment system the grinning, hollow-eyed dealer sliding the vial across the counter of my own fucking spine.
I fell in love with what my laboratory made of him. He was the perfect compound. The brown powder of every unmet need melted down into one tall, multilingual boy with just enough distance to keep the drip slow, just enough sweetness to keep me believing, just enough damage to mirror my own. I didn’t inject his personhood. I injected his symbolism.
A state of toxic metabolic adaptation. No longer a person, but a precursor chemicals walking. The perfect substrate. Every unmet scream from the girl choking on silence at the dinner table, every flinch from the recoil of classmates' laughter, every drop of shame sweating through the freshly-ironed shirt at piano recitals were all distilled, purified, and crystallised into the form of a tall boy with a damaged smile and languages that sounded like the fire that would unthaw the permafrost from my Soviet-Confucian upbringing. I didn't crave him. I craved the molecular structure my trauma forced him to wear. I injected the meaning, not the man. I mainlined the symbol.
Every ingredient he carried matched the chemical signature my trauma blueprint was always searching for: His height (196cm) was not stature. Looming. A physical manifestation of every authority figure who ever looked down and found me wanting. The boys whose locker room approval was currency I could never mint. If this monument chooses me, the verdict would be overturned. The pitied girl erased. Redeemed. Proved valuable at the cellular level. His tattoos, techno, and rebellion became a live wire plunged into the stagnant pool of "piano prodege" compliance, Soviet repression, and dinner-table humiliation. He is the Molotov cocktail to my frozen shame. His chaos is not attraction; it is validation. Proof my own internal riot wasn't madness, but freedom. His noise would finally drown out the screaming silence inside my skull. His language fluency in romanic languages were not about communication, but catalysts, that sparked dopamine cascades associated with celluloid passion, and hands grasping in dimly lit alleys somewhere in Palermo, Buones Aires or Nice. They melted Austrian rigidity and the Confucian piety. They were the chemical formula for the burning love my nervous system, starved on neglect, was genetically modified to demand.
His desirability by others was not about his charm, but a potency enhancer. He is the scarce resource. The golden syringe. If everyone wants him, and he injected me? It chemically neutralises the acid of every past rejection. The recoil erased. The humiliation metabolised into triumph. His choice is nothing, but the antidote to invisibility.
His emotional inaccessibility is not interpreted as a flaw but functions perfectly as the perfect fucking delivery mechanism. His distance wasn't absence; it was the perfect pump setting. It matched the core trauma signature my parents would sign on letters from school: Love = Pain = Proof of Existence. His withdrawal is not rejection; it is the scrape of the spoon against the bottle, the tightening of the belt, the ritual that precedes the rush. It triggers the desperate, biochemical labour to earn the dose. To make him want me was survival. It lit the furnace in my gut that incinerated reason.
He became a compound so potent, so exquisitely tailored to my broken receptors, that nothing else registered. Weed? Dying grass. Alcohol? Sugar water. Other men? Impotent saline. I needed heroin. And my body made him heroin. Not the human who leaves dishes in the sink. Not the flesh-and-blood creature with doubts and flaws. No. My internal alchemy transformed him into a crystalline structure of unmet attachment, a neurochemical IED wired directly to my reward pathway.
Dopamine (craving). Oxytocin (bonding under duress). Vasopressin (obsessive territoriality). Endorphins (painkiller for the self-inflicted wound). A cocktail injected straight into the limbic system. The moment his skin contacted mine? The pipeline ruptured. No decision. No choice. Just flood. A chemical seizure. Feel it rising? The vice in the chest. The cinematic reel spooling behind closed eyelids. The electric slickness between my thighs. The saliva pooling like a starving dog's. The vertebrae dissolving, leaving me a puddle of need against him. All choreographed by ancient, terrified circuitry. All costumed as love.
But it was never love. It was the reactivation of every neural pathway carved by abandonment. Every echo in an empty hallway. Every snicker when I reached out a trembling hand. Every popular boy's shudder when partnered with you in gym class. Every lesson seared into your synapses: Proximity = Safety. Desire = Worth. Silence = Death. Being Chosen = Oxygen. So when this specific compound – the one speaking romance, wearing rebellion, radiating broken allure from a height that mimicked childhood gods chose me? The circuits overloaded. Chosen was saved. Chemical saturation was intimacy. His withdrawal was my fundamental failure. His body became my only metric of value.
When he stopped the supply? It's not heartbreak. It is withdrawal in a biochemical torture chamber. Not insomnia, but the central nervous system going into full hyperarousal. Not loss of appetite, but gut microbiome screaming famine. Scanning hallways? Auditory hallucinations seeking the dealer's footsteps. Lying in bed? The writhing of a poisoned animal, muscles locked in rigour of need. Crawling into his room to lie beside his sleeping form? Not affection. Desperate biofeedback. Proof of object permanence for a nervous system stuck in infantile terror: If he vanishes, I cease. Not metaphor. Metabolic collapse. He is not just like heroin; my brain used him AS heroin. A neurochemical fact written in cortisol and crashing dopamine.
This is the marrow of my Step One. Powerless not over him, but over the apocalypse he triggers in my cells. Powerless over the synaptic screams. Powerless over the adrenal tsunami when he turns his back, and where cortisol becomes battery acid in the veins. Powerless over the pathetic bargaining that starts with the jingle of his keys, as my dopamine forces me begging on its knees. Powerless over how anticipation twists into demand, how longing ferments into rage, how my body dilates for injection before my lips even shape his name. Powerless over the shame-shroud that follows: the internal hiss: "Dramatic. Needy. Unlovable. Too much. Not enough. Pathetic."
Unmanageable? What do you think? Do you think , life is manageable when you are chemically abducted. My home isn't a home; it's a den saturated with triggers. The bed isn't for sleep; it's the spoon where hope gets cooked down to residue. The shower isn't cleansing; it's the lighter held under the spoon, steam rising like phantom smoke. The couch isn't for sitting; it's the tourniquet cinched tight on reality, veins bulging with unmet need. Watching him offer a dab, like a shared joke, a casual touch, to someone else? It's not jealousy. It's witnessing your dealer give your fix to another junkie while you rot. Vasopressin turning into pure mammalian possessiveness. Biochemical emergency. Cortisol detonates. Gut lining shreds. Throat seals like a tomb. Heart hammers against ribs like a caged bird trying to escape a furnace. This isn't feeling abandoned. This is the primal shriek of the hindbrain: EXTINCTION. So I break. I text. I weep. I grovel. I open the door - the alley door - body trembling, pupils blown, whispering the addict's eternal lie: "Just this once. Just to stop the dying." Knowing it will hurt. Knowing it won't last. Knowing I am the lie.
That’s why I’m here. Naked in the wreckage.
Because the scales have fallen, not from my eyes, but from my synapses. This isn't a sad love story. It's a case study in endogenous substance dependence. Not a breakup, but detox unit admission. This is my Step One, written not in ink, but in the tremors of withdrawal and the cold sweat of revelation:
I am powerless over the heroin my own body manufactures from the ghost of him. My life has become a biohazard zone – unmanageable, unsustainable, a testament to chemical tyranny.
But I choose the scalpel. I choose the brutal, cellular truth.
