Induced delirium

A sense of consequence was marred one day in my mind as I was
scouring the cluttered pit I slept in. Hands and knees to the floor I
fumbled for a needle not yet used. In searching I tossed a translucent
little bottle against the scratched wood floor.
"Warning" it read, "may be habit forming"

Oops.

As the opiate desire built a bear trap in my stomach I was flooded and
drowned by memory. Two months prior there had been no needles. Just
valiums. Valiums and Phenobarbitals. Codeines and hydrocodones and
oxycodones and darvocets and maxidones and vicodins and oxycontins. The
supply never dwindled so I never thought to stop. The habit continued
to build.
Sitting at my kitchen table so many mornings ago counting shots of
morphine-sulfate my life became surreal, an opiate haze. Syringes took
the place of meals, the marks on my arm too evident. And in this
panicked moment I'm aware that I am another stupid slave to a
substance. I settle, eventually for a needle not so new that I had used
perhaps a week ago. The bear trap snapped in my stomach and I rush
myself to shoot up.
Sitting on the counter, tourniquet tied, I find a flash inside my head
of a friend not dead but full of scars who could never shoot on his
own. A flash of when I stuck the needle in his arm but made a slip and
stuck too far. Through the vein and into the arm the morphine flowed
and pushed against the skin. A morphine blister remained in memory as I
cleaned the space beyond my elbow and brought the point towards the
blue of my arm. Nearly too dull to use I exert more force and pierce
the skin and wince with pain and shoot the liquid slowly in my vein.
And in doing so the body numbs and the mind becomes indifferent. Eyes
glazed over I gaze out the window and there is no nagging notion of
disgust or worry. Nothing seemed so bad at all as the day dreamt by in
a summer way, my face heated by the late June sun. In another day I
feared infection, found a new needle quickly dulled, and dropped to the
floor, a half-conscious being. Two months prior there had been no
needles.