I’m laying on my bed. Well it’s actually just a bare mattress on the floor but it works just fine for sleeping. Not that I’m really sleeping. I’ve got the best of Trance, House and Techno of the eighties and nineties blasting louder than I can stand because it was the only cd I could find. I don’t even know where I got the stupid thing. I can feel the music in the core of my being. There is a reason this is the music of choice at raves. It’s the same thing over and over and over. You know how when you stare at graph paper, after a while the lines jump out of you? Think that but physical sensation pulsing through your entire body. It’s sensational.

But that’s not why I have techno, trance and house music blasting louder than my ear drums can stand. I’ve decided to give up the shit for good, heroin I mean. Mind you, I could have prepared better. I pretty much stopped everything. Eating, drinking, sleeping to name a few things. Now I need the music to distract me from the pain. To try and lull me to sleep. My spine rattles as each cell in my tiny emaciated frame pulsates with the droning monotone bass line. My muscles spasm making me flail about like a fish out of water. Gasping for breath. Trying to flop back into water. Into safety, where everything will be all right again. I want everything to go back to the way it was when things were good. When one hit would last me a good eighteen hours.

I was always special. I could ride one hit longer than anyone else. I had mastered the ability to act sober without killing my buzz. To be realistic, I only seemed sober to anyone who wasn’t. Put me face to face with any ordinary bloc and just watch what kind of fucked up weird comes out of my mouth. To be honest, this is why people liked having me around. When things got boring they’d track down the one person in the area who shouldn’t have been and sat them down with me. I didn’t really mind. I got what ever substance was being passed around free of charge.

I was always a whore like that. I’d let people take advantage of me so I could take advantage of them. A lot of people didn’t notice me using them. I got a pretty bad second hand reputation in some circles. Mostly in the circles of people who had only ever seen me at parties but had never bothered to, you know, approach me and stuff. They’d watch from the distance and miss the subtle details. Like me getting free hits. Like me getting satisfaction. Like me never sleeping with the guys who thought they were playing me. I was smarter than that. I didn’t want to get the plague. The white disease. AIDS. I always had my own clean needles for my use only when people were cooking up hits. I may have been doing nothing with my life but I’d be damned if I didn’t prolonged it as long as possible.

Which makes you wonder why I was using heroin to begin with. Yeah, I asked myself the same question. Which led me first to become extremely sad. My logic had failed. How many other times had my logic failed? How many times had I been wrong and not known it? How many other people had known that my flawless logic was a sham? How many poor sops had I led off a cliff like a herd of stampeding buffalo? Then I got real paranoid. Afraid I was going to die.

I became convinced that someone had taken a contract out on me. Who you ask? Obviously someone I led off a cliff of stupidity with my failed logic. They would have gone to some dirty obscure bar named Uncle Louts or something to that effect. They would have saddled up to a greasy man in a red track suit. He would have led them to the bathroom in the back where they would talk business. It would be decided that for fifteen grand I would be kidnapped. Stuffed in a bag. Thrown into the back of a car. Whisked off to the country. Shot several times while still in the sac and then tossed off a very high cliff into rocky waters bellow. My body would be found years later after my face had been plastered all over missing posters that would have been torn down within days of being put up. No one would care.

The thought scared me shitless. I locked myself in my apartment. Without realizing that I had no food, no drugs, no money and no plans of ever leaving this shit hole of a living space I could barely afford. When they found me. And by they I mean my mates. My keepers. I was dehydrated, starving and ready to kill, mangle and maim for heroin. Ah heroin, that lovely little powder that cooked up real fine. Before I could even see straight enough to know what was happening I found water being poured down my throat as that beautiful sting I had been longing for for days, the needle breaking the skin of the crook of my arm. It came over me like a wave. It’s better than sex could ever be. Not that I knew what that was like. I’m still a virgin, I think.

I found myself cradled by those who really cared. Leaning on someone’s chest. Someone’s hands were in my hair, stroking, playing, petting. We were a tangle of limbs. Almost as though we were all one body. In a more spiritual way we were. These were the people I got high with. There were no longer any separate entities. We were all one person. And I had gone missing. The loss was noted and then remedied.

This oneness was sickening. I had lost my soul. Heroin took it from me. I had to give the shit up. That’s what brought me to this point. In my tiny one room flat with dingy purple walls and rotting splintering floor. Some how I went from the bed to the old once lime green threadbare rug. My bones rattle in my skin and they knock against the hard, hard, hard floor. My skin is like dry paper. Brittle and white. It feels like I am coated with a thin powder. My parched lips have glued themselves together.

The walls keep inching closer and then jumping way back to farther than they’re supposed to be. The chair in the corner scuttles back and forth as the door knob whispers naughty, evil thoughts in my ear. I thrash around, grabbing at my ears. Wishing the noise would stop. Wishing that the words of long forgotten poems from useless high school english classes would stop floating and swirling in the air all around me.

The door that I had so painstakingly boarded shut and shoved what I thought would be too heavy to be moved and thus serve as a perfect barricade. I forgot that things with wheels can still be moved if you don’t take the wheels off. It’s Demon standing there and he’s looking at me funny. Maybe it’s because I’m screaming and on floor only wearing an old tank top I thought was the sexiest thing ever in grade eight and my spider man underroos.

“You are the craziest cunt I have ever met.” He says to me, sitting down beside my head and lighting a cigaret. Demon was never part of The Entity. I always liked him. He liked me some too. I stop screaming long enough to take a drag of his cigaret when he offers it to me. I stop screaming all together now. He isn’t a hit man coming to knock me off. In fact I am now safe from any intruder who might come to harm me. Demon is cool that way. His philosophy is that no one gets beat up around him unless he’s the one doing the beating.

The cigaret makes me cough. My lungs are working in over drive enough without the added smoke. He chuckles. It’s a soothing sound. It makes me realize that the music has kicked out. In fact the whole place is dark and silent. Silent except for my heart beating a million times a second. SIlent except for the loud crashing as my eyes blink. Silent except for Demon who is eerily quiet yet the noisiest son of a bitch ever to be this near me.

He’s looking at me funny. There is kindness in his eyes. There is never anything in his eyes but hardness. He strokes my hair, pushing it back out of my face. The power’s been cut out. How long have I been here? I thought I paid that bill with the money I stole from The Entity. Why hasn’t The Entity come to take it back? To take me back?

I blink and I’m back on the mattress. This time I’m wrapped up nice and snug in the blankets that I thought were kicked into a corner. Demon’s evil, beautiful smile greets me. Why is he still here? Why did he come here in the first place? Apparently I’m speaking out loud because he tells me that he’s been looking for me for a while. Says that I haven’t been around the usual haunts and he was missing me. Missing my antics. Missing my purdy little self. Missing watching me interact with The Entity. I just stare.

There are his words, right in front of me. I mean literally. As he spoke they spelled themselves out for me. Now I read them over and over trying to comprehend what he’s meaning to say. Looking for the right inflection that will tell me if he’s either being sarcastic or confessing some arcane feeling that is foreign and unknown to me. I tell him I’m getting clean. That heroin is the devil and I will no longer be Lucifer’s consort. He doesn’t believe me. So he takes out his kit. I flail as he tries to put a tourniquet on my arm.

Now I am violent. The screams erupt from my dry throat. I push his instruments of destruction away from me. Ruining his drugs. Drugs he probably paid more money for than most would have. I don’t care. I’m not going to let him do something to me against my will. I’m not everybody’s little whore.

He’s staring at me in something between shock and disbelief. Or a least I think he is. I could be imagining it. Because his face is blank as ever and his eyes just as hard. Something shifts. He leans down and kisses me on the lips. Sensations buzz at me and it’s like an explosion. Tie dye colors swim at me in waves. I hear a humming and a buzzing. I feel like I am the string of a harp. Pulled taught and vibrating. Creating the most harmonious sounds.

I wake up and I am alone again. The door is wide open. A little kid is staring at me from down the hall. I can’t help smiling. The feeling of that kiss still on my lips. My spine curves as my muscles contract and my body twists and contorts. I am too hot. I’m in a cold sweat. Pain shoots through all my bones. I wish I had some water. Fuck it. I wish I had the biggest bottle of vodka known to man. I wish I had mashed potatoes and strawberry jam and noodles in those little cups and green beans and grilled cheese sandwiches. My stomach demands that I eat something. The rest of me is telling me this is a bad idea.

I’m scared of dying but I don’t want to go on living. I don’t want another hit but I can’t imagine what it would be like not to have one. A light bulb turns on above me. Demon brought some heroin with him. Maybe it’s still here. I feel around and realize I’m not exactly where I should be. And the floor is completely devoid of anything useful to me. I see my light bulb dance on the ceiling as the little kid from down the hall plays with a flash light.

The shaking is so bad I think there is an earth quake. This time there is no one to the rescue. No strong hands to hold me down. The walls are playing tricks on me again. Images filter through my vision distorted. Tormenting me with unwanted memories. Each memory forming a list. A list of reasons reinforcing that I am on the right path now. That this is good. I don’t notice that I am knocking my head on the wall and the floor over and over.

I wake up piled in a heap in the farthest corner of my little hole. The one corner I have always avoided for some inexplicable reason. The tremors have stopped. I feel weak but alive. There is a glass sitting in my field of vision. It is filled with nice clear water. Beside it are two aspirin for the head ache I have inadvertently given myself. I down the pills and the water a little too quickly.

With renewed strength I manage to get up. Muscles that have not been in proper use for some time protest but I ignore their cause. The fridge has been stocked with all the things that I vaguely remember craving. It was as if some guardian angle had read my thoughts. There is a note for me taped to one of the shelves in the fridge. I guess It was a guardian Demon reading my thoughts after all. Or maybe I just don’t have an inner monologue.