Waking up is never easy for me. Winters make it harder. And bupe maintenance? I’m on such a low dose now I don’t know why I still bother, but I’m afraid of the withdrawals. 

The bupe keeps me more or less stable, but, like most of us, I miss the high of a good shot of heroin now and then. I crave the high, sometimes.

Today’s one of those days. 

I stumble out into the kitchen, rubbing my eyes. Last night’s dishes confront me. The living room is a mess, and the whole flat needs a good vacuuming…

Ah, stuff it, says a little voice in my head. Let’s see if —-’s phone is switched on…

Minutes later, I’m on my way down the road to make the transaction. The gear’s been of variable quality lately… I cross my fingers, hoping today’s a good day.

One thing’s for sure, my dealer doesn’t keep me waiting. The deal done, I head home with my precious packet of white powder. As soon as I get in the door, I clear a space on the dining room table and start mixing up.  

Loading my syringe lovingly, I tap the bubbles from the mixture in the barrel, tie my arm off, and begin the ever-more-difficult search for a vein. My dry, cracked fingers move across the softer skin of my inner arm, and then downwards towards my wrists. ”Best practice” injecting would have me avoid the wrist and hand area altogether, but the pale pink dotted scars tell another story. It’s been harder and harder for me to find a vein anywhere, so I utilise the spots I can find.

One false try, then - yes! - I hit a vein. The blood trickles, then mushrooms up into the pale liquid heroin as I pull back a little on the plunger. Yup, we’re set to launch.

I press the plunger down. Slowly, slowly… and then the drugs are in my body.

I feel a wave of…

Disappointment. Nothing. If there was the hint of a buzz in there, I missed it! 

I shake my head, light a cigarette and start packing my equipment away. What a waste of time that was, I think, one more hole in my arm and a whole lot poorer. Not again.  

Self-loathing competes with annoyance in my mind, and I continue cleaning the house, straight.

It’s late afternoon in Brisbane; the humid air collects into sweat which rolls down my back as the grey clouds above threaten rain. I sit on the back porch, typing idly into my laptop, a plume of smoke from my half-smoked cigarette curling lazily into the heavy atmosphere. I am reading a few of my favourite blogs, and reflecting on the nature of the addiction we all share…

And suddenly, a refrain from an old sixties protest song the aging hippies I had as teachers taught us in primary school, runs through my mind.  

“When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?”

I think of the behaviour of my fellow junkies and I, and I have to wonder. Will we ever learn? Or are we doomed to forever be haunted by the memory of the opiates… the kiss of steel and the opiate rush which seem, by now, so much a part of who we are?

Yoshi asked me this the other day. He is the age now, that I was when I started using heroin. (Lesser opiates had been part of my life, on and off, since my teenage years. But once heroin got its hooks into me, it’s been a rare week I’ve been without - except during my year in the United States. Ten years already, and it shows no sign of easing up.)

“Will this longing ever go away, or is the sweet rush of that opiate pleasure burned into our soul for good?”

As I told him, I’m older but no wiser… well aware of the tens of thousands I’ve shot up my arm in my pursuit of a little peace, or perhaps just peace of mind? But no wiser as to why the allure still remains. Regardless, I should know better these days. 

Word is there’s a heroin drought all up and down the east coast - people getting ripped off, even the best of dealers reduced to selling stuff much sketchier than they’d ever push at another time. The gear is, in a word, shithouse. 

Those of us on maintenance therapy, or without a severe habit, are the lucky ones. But something in us still screams for the score, for the hit, for the few precious moments of bliss… even if we know the price is too high in the end.

The price is too high, to keep seeking the high. But do we learn? Not easily, it seems, and none too well. Why?

“The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind, the answer is blowin’ in the wind.”       

When I started this blog, many months ago, it was not my intention to leave it so long between posts. I was going to write often, and I was going to write well.
Hmmmm. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, isn’t it? (Perhaps it’s a good thing that I don’t subscribe to the traditional Judeao-Christian belief system, then.)
Mea culpa, folks. I screwed up. To the five or so of you who still read this, I apologise and ask your forgiveness.
As I was so sarcastically reminded the other day, putting up one post in three months doesn’t constitute blogging on a regular basis. Then again, I had my reasons, including the ever-increasing paranoid delusions held by the webmaster of the site where this blog was previously hosted. Sadly, this young man felt threatened by any of his bloggers who dared to “step out of line” by not bending over backwards to kiss his Hepatitis C-ridden arse on a daily basis. To this same someone, who felt justified in terminating his blog-hosting agreement with me for no reason whatsoever, earlier this week, I say: Get over yourself.
Anyway, in line with my New Year’s Resolution to post more often, I’ll be updating at the very least once a week from now on, in addition to the other writing work I’ll be doing for this site.
I appreciate your patience, readers (and fellow HeroinDiarists), and I do hope that you’ll find something here of worth, a little more often than has been the case in the past.
Thanks and, once again, sorry for the extended silence.

One day in the late 1990’s…

Early morning. It has been a broken night; I have not managed much sleep. The night has been victim of my own poor sleep patterns, my unusual work hours, and my addiction. Time after time I awaken to the bright red digits on my alarm clock, their early morning numbers unblinkingly taunting my sleepless mind. The digits change from minute to minute, but the underlying message remained constant: You’re wasting your life. With every injection of H, you dig your own grave, woman. Every taste, such a waste. This is your life and it’s ending one minute at a time…

I blink, sigh, and wish myself back to sleep. Wish in one hand, and shit in the other… which one fills first? The voice in my head will not go away; in fact, it grows loudest in the early morning hours, when the world is asleep and all is quiet. Peace? Not bloody likely.

Somehow I manage an hour and a half of sleep. When I open my eyes again, the sun is streaming through the window; the world outside is awake and moving. My stomach sinks, as it does every morning. Rise and shine? Hardly. Well, rise and dial… dial the number that will bring me what I need…

The number is hardwired into my mind, I have called it so many times before. The call connects; a female voice answers flatly. “Yeah.” “Hi, it’s me… You around?” The voice on the other end answers in the affirmative, and my heart leaps with hope. “Please drop by, I need to see you for five minutes,” I say to her - my dealer. She knows what I mean. She assures me she’ll be there within the hour, and hangs up.

Waiting. Waiting. A junky spends a good part of his or her life waiting. With so much practice, you’d think it would get easier – it doesn’t. I manage to fill the time, much as I fill the countless spaces in my life like this one, somehow… somehow idling the time away, marking time until the important stuff happens. As always. The important stuff? Nothing more than the next score, the next hit. This is what my life has boiled down to. Waiting.

Forty-five minutes later, there is a knock on my door. Oh, early for once, I think, as I open the door with a smile and a nod. “Come in,” I say, as my dealer mumbles her greeting. I murmur something in return, but even as I go through the motions of politeness, all I can think of is H, Harry, Hammer, Skag, Smack… the H… come on, give us the HEROIN already dammit…

The deal is quickly done; money traded for a packet of white powder. Once upon a time, not so long ago, this very dealer used to comment on how I would continue chatting to her after our transaction, blithely ignoring the precious gear in my hands. No longer. Today, I am mixing up my packet of dope even as I smile and listen to my dealer’s bitching about the crosstown traffic. I am tapping up a vein on the inside of my arm, as she says, “I’ll let myself out. You be careful, now. That stuff’s good.” Good stuff? Excellent, I think. “Okay, see you later,” I call out distractedly, my eyes on the prize… the blue vein pulsing beneath my fingertips, the syringe full of heroin in my other hand.

Footsteps across the floor, the door opens then closes behind her. I am alone again (S. is at work; I’ve put his taste aside for later.) I take a deep breath, aim the syringe, then slide the needle into my vein, draw back the flower of blood which tells me I’ve hit the spot.

I press the precious liquid home, and sigh. The drug quickly rushes through my system; I feel ready to face the world again.

This is my daily routine. This is my life, measured out in coffee spoons (and orange-capped syringe and needle sets). T.S. Elliot surely never envisaged such a life… the junkylife.

The internal voice - that nagging alter-ego which haunts my early-morning, dopesick hours - is silenced momentarily, mercifully, under the blanket of opiates coursing through my body. I savour the brief rush, then go about the motions of getting ready for work.

Another day, another dollar, another taste. Another nail in your coffin, woman. The infernal treadmill…