Throwing up into the blurred white of the toilet bowl, I leave my body. A crack, deep as the holes in my heart breaks open and I tumble in, swallowed by the eroticism provided by the drug and my closeness to death. Taking twice the dosage to receive twice the boost to Heaven, I’m blind, disoriented. The blankness of white nothing pulls me out and disconnects me from the gap in judgment and lights my consciousness with bright, hot fire. As sweat traces down my back in delicate patterns, over my crooked spine and jutting hips, clarifying flames ignite. The fire eats away at my flesh. The fire runs through my veins. The fire courses beneath my muscles. The fire spreads throughout the marrow of my bones. My whole being understands.

The emptiness in my stomach, the well digging down, the nausea, that aching won’t leave me. It’s profound. It’s completely consuming. I feel like curling up, serpentine on the floor, and crying. I need a thousand and one pounds of heroin. I need to drown myself in methamphetamine. I need a mountain of pills, a field of weed, vials and vials of acid.

I need to get sober.

How am I expected to quit a bad habit that has come to define me? Who will be left after I cease using those substances that simultaneously snatch my soul away and provide me with a reason to live? To stop myself from lighting up that cigarette, from injecting that needle, from inhaling that line, from swallowing those pills, I had to scour within the endless holes in my Swiss-cheese brain and ask myself if the hollow-cheeked stranger staring back from the other side of the mirror, face spiced with sores and sunken eyes reflecting death, was a person I was content with living inside. My realization splashes back in my face as I throw up into the familiar porcelain: I am not a drug addict.

It took speed to catch up to me, snatch away my sobriety, and seduce me into sedation again for me to see into the depths of my dilated eyes and see the potential buried behind burning embers of intoxication. I need to live faster even if it means dying younger, but permitting myself to be intoxicated with the Devil’s sticky sweet-talk and his promises providing expectations of soaring with the stars is not who the real me is.

I am me. I am my own self, my own person. I don’t need to take orders from a little baggie of crystal. Today I am coherent, in control, and I tell one hell of a captivating story. While my past decisions were dusted in a thick layer of intoxicating escape, they shaped me into the unmistakably strong person I have become. I can’t say I walked away from this experience untouched by those life-destroying substances’ vicious strokes, but I can wear my well-earned experience and newly discovered self-respect with pride without hiding behind an insecure could of smoke. I am not a drug addict: anymore.