A Momentary Lapse of Reason

Watch your thoughts; they become words. 

Watch your words; they become actions. 

Watch your actions; they become habits. 

Watch your habits; they become character. 

Watch your character; it becomes your destiny. 

Frank Outlaw

The ordinary but gloomy side of addiction

I was still sweating when I woke up that cold day in December, and there was just one consideration on my mind. Do or die, but the day had to go away without using any substance. I had had it enough. 

 

However, between the options I was offered, the urge to go high was more vehement than the indifference of staying sober. The thoughts prompted by the ill-effects of using things that alter my mood had become an ostensible reason that I was not entirely mad and that there was some rationality left in my psyche. 

 

Otherwise, I cared for a shot first thing in the morning; a single shot and nothing else. Simply because I had to use it; there was no other way I could see. You eat or starve, you live or die — it was insignificant; but you gotta get the stuff. Anyways, you don't have to cite any explanation why you had chose this way of life. I woke up with a resolute mind, but my compulsion was unfaltering too. 

The frosty morning air appeared to be more hostile to my sobriety. It was quite abnormal to spend the day without getting high. There is no higher zenith than feeling unusual in the sombre mindset — the unusual become the usual, and the usual the unusual, when your body builds up a tolerance to the substances. And that is one of the extreme sicknesses of an addicted mind. 

 

The struggle to stay clean seemed an eternal predicament. It's sheer moral weakness and utter lack of will-power. I had lost my selfhood, my dignity but these did not matter as long as I was getting any source of sustenance. But I tried to try hard. It was only morning hours and I had a long day to spend. The lazy, indifferent sun hardly moved, as if it was testing my impatience.

The situation became bad to worse as the pain slowly fanned out from the brain to each and every part of the body. There is just one locution to describe the feeling – desperately sick and tired. The balky consciousness that I had to do or die somehow reduced the acute restlessness. But that was not enough. The uneasiness accentuated as the day progressed. It hiked. It became madness. 

 

It took a long, really long time to fight off a temptation, but it always takes only a few seconds to succumb to the impulse, depriving ourselves of any decency and morality. Finally, I could not take it longer. 

The sluggish sun had set but the frustration rose to new height. I rushed to the headquarter — a slang for the ghetto, where the stuffs are available; where men come to hawk their possessions to get a fix, and women live to sell their body. In that gaggle, I had a momentary lapse of reason. Live or die, but I had to get the shot.