There’s more than one kind of monster.
Type and I pass the pipe. The overhead light flickers and the wind picks up even more. It’s coming from the north because with each exhale, the smoke slips past my face, back toward the Twin Cities and my dead parents.
But for a brief moment, I’m not thinking about all that. I’m feeling the closest thing I can think of to God and he’s playing the samba inside of my body, his fingers gentle, as they press on the backs of my retinas, my spine, the tendons along my hip flexors. I’m thinking that I love drugs more than anything. That they are the one and only constant in my life. Yeah, they demand a lot of attention and effort, but their love is legendary, their compassion endless. I hold each hit for hours, exhale for decades. The determination that comes with the onset of a high rushes back and I’m all about conquering the world and making money and finding happiness in the form of a loving woman who knows when it’s time to brush the backs of her nails across my cheek and then I’m thinking about this being the same thing as what God is doing to me now.
I love it when my heart rattles against my uvula.
I love it when my vision is a camera shutter.
I love it when I know that someday, I will do great things.
I love it when methamphetamines make things okay.
But I don’t love it when I start to hallucinate because the line between knowing it’s only the drugs and knowing your psyche is about to snap the fuck apart like a high wire is oh so delicate....
—From Fiend, a novel by Peter Stenson
