Junk ~ #1

 

Penelope preferred the earthy, red-brown balls of opium that she rolled from the sticky bricks they picked up in the labyrinthine alleys of Bombay, to the usually white, sometimes pink or brown heroin they scored to take home.

 

The powder was easier to transport, with more return on investment.

 

It was a dangerous game. The game of using dope was pretty risky all round, but once in, she knew she would play it till the dice no longer rolled in her favour. So far luck remained on her side, and she calculated the risks to some degree. Or thought she did. A part of her was always watching, and the exploration intrigued her. She watched as her senses distorted and dissolved then re-ordered into a whole new pattern. It was as if the pathways in her brain were being deconstructed and reformed. She found it was easy to move into those spaces in between. Between and beyond thought or sensation.

 

Living and moving through the world of misfits and outcasts, she learned humility. She thought it might have been something like living in a leper colony. A modern colony of untouchables.

 

It was a demanding lifestyle, but she found solace amongst her piratical band. In spite of the fact that most of them were without morality when it came to gathering the means to score, she found her troupe, on the whole, were stripped of artifice where cultural image went. In the swing between feeling incredibly ill, with the promise of it just getting worse, and the holy moment of redemption when the smooth fire of the drug filled your veins with liquid amber and, in the best moments, lifted you into the golden realm of the gods, it was pure essence; there was no time for judgment, and ego had to find its place as well.

I learned a lot being a junkie, she thought.

 

Junk ~ #2

 

The rain fell in sheets hurled sideways toward the walls of the cabin. She loved the sound of it pelting against the galvanised iron roof. The cabin sat on a ridge winding along the eastern side of the high northern ranges and overlooked a steep valley that fell toward the Pacific Ocean she could see glistening in the distance. She had stood outside not two hours ago, whirling like a dervish, long wet hair flying and shift plastered against her body, thunder and lightning crashing around her bouncing off the hills behind and echoing down into the valley lit by the silver-white light of the electric storm. Now she sat quietly watching a river of rain that spoke to her of hope curtain the windows. She pondered the power of rain to bring a sense of renewal to parched land and spirit, as well as terror and devastation. Too much of a good thing can kill you, she thought. Just like junk.

 

She didn’t regret her experience with junk. She felt privileged to have been given the opportunity to face the Lady in all her aspects. And survive. Many didn’t. It wasn’t for everyone. But the Lady showed you how to die and be reborn. She led you through the eternal spiral of life and death. She taught the phases of resurrection – birth/renewal, growth/learning, acceptance/surrender, death on a cross of matter created by your own choice, an agonizing period curled in the dark recesses of mind, cells screaming for the redemption of the serpent’s kiss, to final resurrection, whether it be through the benevolence of the needle, or all the way to the end-game of becoming ‘clean.’

 

Pen had come to the isolated cabin in a final push toward reprogramming her junk parched cells and washing them of the desire to “drink from the needle,” as master junky and poet William Burroughs so perfectly expressed it.

Her cells had not drunk from the needle for three weeks. A tour de force. Yet, waking from sweat drenched dreams, head throbbing, heart racing, sheets twisted around her limbs, she still tasted the junk hit the back of her throat as it rose through her veins.

 

Junk killed the pain – it eased a broken heart. It brought clarity and light to those with eyes to see. Yet the promise of such bliss carried within it the seed of death. This was the Law. Knowing it, one took every taste with some reverence, no matter how - or what - or whom, brought you to worship at this particular altar.

 

Excerpt from "In the Garden of Dark Flowers" 
© Anna West 2017