A letter to … My brother, who doesn’t know that I’m a heroin addict

You came to visit me last year. Together we planned your trip. You were to stay at my house – I didn’t even realise that your grown-up form (so much taller and broader now) would be far too long for my short couch.

I came to meet you at the airport. I woke up early so that I could be there, ready and waiting. I imagined standing in arrivals, watching for you to emerge from the crowd. I knew that I would recognise you, even though I hadn’t seen you for many years.

I was late, of course. I’m late for everything now. I used to be so obsessively punctual, anxiously arriving at least half an hour early for appointments, studiously mapping journeys and carefully estimating travel times. But I overslept and then, at the airport, I spent a good 20 minutes in the first bathroom I could find, nervously at first and then gradually becoming less nervous, smoking heroin off the tin foil that I carry with me everywhere I go.

I came out of the bathroom and was calmer and happier and a little bit dozy. I saw you right away. Everything was great. You smiled so wide and hugged me. And everything was comfortably numbed and blurry.

I love heroin. I love it more than I love anything else in this world – more than I ever have loved or will ever let myself love anything or anyone else. My heart is beating so fast as I write this, and my palms are prickling damp with sweat. I’m eight hours without heroin and two hours after methadone.

I love heroin because it numbs me. It gave me just what I needed the first time I tried it, which was the ability to remove myself from my life at last, to remove myself from the self that I loathe so deeply and without reason. When I am high – which is all of the time, now – I can negate everything. Nothing else matters any more. I have chosen to reject prevailing lifestyle norms and the desires, both material and emotional, that come with these norms. I never thought that I could achieve anything anyway, so it is really just me in my 20s, mumbling a neat, easy and lazy “fuck this” as I remove myself from the world and sink into an opiate haze to hide.

Keeping my drug use from you is exhausting and you deserve my honesty, not the lie I present to the world

I meant to tell you, of course. I mean to do a lot of things. A lot of these things are simply forgotten – heroin is very good for forgetting, for removing from conscious thought anything that is not about how much heroin I have right now, or how badly I need it and how much I can buy as soon as possible – but some things, like this, are things that I just cannot bring myself to do.

I wanted to be honest with you. I wanted to start your visit off right, to make you breakfast after your flight and then, when the time was proper, to try my very best to explain to you that, yes, I am a junkie. I’ve got zero money and I’m only just hanging on to a job and I’ve just started on an opiate replacement for the first time. Some days, I do want to stop using heroin; most days, I don’t.

I really wanted to tell you everything. Keeping my drug use from you is exhausting and, more than anyone else, you deserve my honesty, not the duplicitous, multi-natured lie that I present to the rest of the world. I really wanted to tell you, but you’re my little brother. And for some reason you didn’t see the person I have become since we last met; you still saw me as your big sister.

Anonymous

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A letter to … My brother, who doesn’t know that I’m a heroin addict