2:45am Relapse

I KNOW THIS MIGHT HURT SOME OF YOU, my old friends. But I HAVE TO BE FRANK, BECAUSE RELAPSING IS WHAT I'M DOING. Going backwards.

My normal dealer would not serve me tonight, said he had something to do, not back till MONDAY AFTERNOON... Junkie Horror!

So I rang a distant 2nd choice who normally comes good in a drought. First called around 00:40 hrs. Couldn't understand what on earth he was trying to say. Went in a phonebox to call back on my mobile. Still no sense. I assumed I was messing me about (no mutual respect. He thinks I'm soft or stupid or// whatever he thinks. I think he thinks junkies are idiots who will pay anything, wait any time for rubbish. I've known him since he was 16. His original "boss man" is doing life for a shooting. What lovely people.

First he says come to one tube station. Then he says go to flats far nearer another. Giving benefit of the doubt I thought, well maybe he's cabbing for what Anna Grace calls a "booty call" (I would call it casual sex of a friend fck). I stood about under some freezing, shadowy trees well after 1:30am, for a good half hour, on the verge of hypothermia.

2 calls later and my phone credit is down to 22p. Not at all good.

Then I check my calls and realize my MAIN MAN II rang me at 1:45am. I sent an urgent text.

Told Mr Disrespect I'm not waiting any more. Main man said he has the same B as Mr Disrespect, he did me 2 for £15 + one white, which was pink. Pink crack is nearly always good. It was only little because he wanted £25 and I specified, "big darks please and a little white, you'll do THAT for £20, won't you?" (Big crack tiny B I cannot stand. I'm a B-punter, as they call it.) I got da stuff around 2:30.

So I've lapsed back onto crack. Even my lighter wouldn't play ball until I got wrapping paper from a 1 ml syringe, set fire to that and my pink crack piped beautifully.

I love drugs. I know a lot of you, who are my true friends, with cats and gardens and lives and hopes for me will be really upset. I'm despairing now that I will ever attain your kind of normality. As I told my Mum, you KNOW why I went on heroin. "Yes it's because the antidepressants didn't work," she likes to think. Truth being I have been unhappy and I mean desperately unhappy sincd age 8. At 10 I had what a counsellor called "the childhood form of a breakdown" (thought I was dying, washed hands obsessively. In winter they chapped and bled.)

Lots of people have had far worse lives than me. Some never took heroin or crack or drink. Others did and still came off. There is hope. As I've said before I do have willpower. I might seem a bit soft sometimes and people mistake kindness for weakness. I try to be kind, despite everything. TRY. I don't always succeed. I have been called "hard" a few times (always by women), always with a note of disappointment. Who is nasty? Who is nice anyhow? We're all a mixture, by degrees.

I have tried to put in a good word for people who could do with some support. I am not a saint. I'm just an addict trying to be the best person I can be despite it all.

I often feel badly misunderstood.

My biggest revelation in counselling, about 12 years ago was SO WHAT?! So what if the world doesn't understand. People will always think what they please. Live your own life.

I still wish that life could be drug free, even though I have a fully loaded pipe right by me. Night night everyone.

Please, my deepest fear is that some impressionable kid will read this and think drugs are cool. They have inflicted more misery than you could ever imagine. If you're miserable without heroin/crack/crystal/drink/whatever your life will only get ten, twenty, a hundred times more intolerable, more chaotic. And if and when you do finally kick those chemicals (and it's not like giving up smoking, it takes a lot of motivation + professional help) whatever made you so unahppy to start with will still need addressing.

I'm writing for everyone, everywhere. Perhaps I over-explain some slang or aspects of the life but this is so that any English-speaker, however far-flung their location, and addicted or not, will read this and hopefully learn something. I only "preach" in terror that some vulnerable person might think I'm condoning this life. I condone nothing. I try only to describe.

PLEASE STAY SAFE, FRIENDS.

ILLUSTRATED: my life.