First Shot: April, 1995

I sit on the bed and he puts the needle into my arm again.

For someone as pale as I am, with veins so visible just under her skin, it has been remarkably difficult to pierce them. My terror of the needle does nothing to ease the process, and so my forearms are spotted with the beginnings of bruises, perfectly round with a pinpoint at their center. We have been working at this for nearly an hour.

He puts the needle in my arm as I look away. I feel the sharp jab and his soft words of reassurance. “Okaaaaay,” he breathes. “Do NOT move. Got it,” he says.

I look back at my arm, at the tiny plume of blood sliding up through the barrel of the syringe , graceful, like a stormcloud in a quiet sky. “Ready?” he asks me, looking deep into my eyes.

“Ready,” I say. My stomach hangs suspended at the top of the roller-coaster hill.

He pushes the plunger.

I am not new to heroin. It has been four months since my first line and I have come to love this drug; but this is beyond love. When I close my eyes I can see my body dark in afterimage, and the heroin tracing through my veins in a ball of yellow light,. I am lit from within by my own internal comet, watching myself from above as it twists and winds its way towards my heart. Beyond love, beyond sex, beyond death, beyond any other mystery is the plume of blood and the ball of light and it is coming….

I fall back onto the bed as the rush hits. I am above, below, beyond. Every drum-tight string inside me has loosened at last, for the first time in twenty-four years, and I am free.

JP, kneeling beside the bed, laughs low. “Now do you see?” he asks. And I do.