Drugs (in particular coke) provide the most infuriating, annoying yet beautiful experiences anything can provide. When you first start taking them everything is wonderful and new and it feels like you can never be taken down from the peg you’re on. Imagine the happiest place, the best room you’ve ever been in, where everything is fascinating, the walls, the people, the layout, everyone seems to be on the same page and you develop all these new perspectives on things. You come down off it the first time and you just think of how happy you were and how wonderful everything felt. You don’t feel the need to do it again, but the next weekend you do. Everything again feels so good, and you don’t feel tired, you feel like the stress and hurt and wear and tear of day to day life has just disolved into nothing. You’re in your happy place, and it doesn’t really get any better.

Then you start doing it on the odd week night as well as the weekends, and it feels like you know something everyone else doesn’t, and you’ve got all the answers without leaving your living room. But as the gaps between the times you do it shorten and shorten, during those gaps you feel irritable and grouchy and you just spend your time reminiscing about just how fluffy those cushions were. Before you know it, you’re there again, but the more often you are there, the more you forget how nice it feels, you forget how great it is, and it becomes normal. The people who aren’t high don’t get it, they try to bring you down, your family kicks up a fuss, your girlfriend threatens to leave, but eventually your stubborness wears them all down and they all begin to move on. You realise now that you’re alone in this happy place, you enjoy yourself still but you realise that even if you feel they’re right, you can’t now agree with them because that would be giving in. This is where it gets hard. The drugs don’t work as well anymore, you realise that the only common denominator you have with all your “friends” is the drug and that it’s the only thing that really matters to you. You look at yourself in the mirror, people comment on it, but you just think that you look like one of the cool kids, and you’re still living the dream.

This is where it really gets tough. The times when you aren’t high, you feel shit, you can’t eat, you throw up, but the only thing that keeps you going through the day is remembering how good you felt that first time, and that you can get there if you just get enough money for the next bump. And the paradox of the whole thing is that the more shit you feel, the more you need that pick me up, the longer you go without, the more you need it, and it becomes more important to you than food, water, family, everything. At this point you’re completely in crisis, you know you’ve fucked it up with everyone who means anything to you, but the effort of fixing it would mean coming away from the drug and let’s be honest, that’s just not gonna happen. The things you used to love, the work you’ve put in to things for so long just seems meaningless, because without the drug, you have no capacity to love, to laugh, to enjoy even the simplest things. You start selling to fund your habit, your hygiene falls apart, and you sell the dream you felt the first time to people and you don’t even feel bad any more. You laugh at the people who buy an 8 ball once a week and call them junkies, even though you can’t even wake up properly without doing a gram. You stay up all weekend in your disgusting clothes time after time thinking its something to be proud of, you proudly tell people how much coke you did this weekend and can’t even read the look of disgust on their faces anymore.

And even when you stop, you’re still fucked, even when you’ve been clean you still long for that first bump, just once more. All your hopes, dreams and aspirations have gone in a line of white powder, and you know, that you’ll fall again at any given moment.