Worst Week

I haven't thought about Herman Hesse in years, but a friend brought him up the other day. I remembered how obsessed I was with Demian when I was in college, especially the line "nothing is more distasteful to man than the path that leads to himself." It sums up the past week nicely, but also the past six years, which is how long I've been eating opiates. I've only just recently realized the effect I love is less about dulling my senses from the outside world than it is about keeping me from my own thoughts. I think this is why I've had such trouble with the whole 12 step-program and why I've always rejected it as an option for me. The whole idea of one day at time is bullshit. It is one second at a time. Every single second of the day I have to fight with myself not to pick up the phone.
That's a lie.
Every single second of the day I have to fight with myself not to open my lock box and take what's still in there.
This is what's so evil about painkillers. They trick you into keeping you from yourself while you're on them, and then when you are off them, they still keep you from yourself because you're too busy fighting off the urges to spend any time figuring out how to stay off of them for any real length of time.
Obviously I had a major slip-up this week. I spent all of it inside, eating Percocet. I don't even like Percocet. A friend of mine was making an analogy about something else that fits nicely with how I feel about that brand - it's like when you're having sex and you're almost there, but you can't have an orgasm no matter how hard you try. With Percocet I am constantly chasing the full high but I can't quite reach it, no matter how many I take. There's too much acetaminophen in them I guess.
Add to this the fact that I upped my Lexapro dosage on Monday (doctor approved, not on my own), and my body waged full on chemical warfare with me all week. I spent a lot of time thinking about the man above, who was my first real, true, hardcore love. We were even going to get married. Before I discovered Vicodin, he and I got messed up once by smoking pot and eating tons of Tylonal with codeine that he had gotten from Canada. I only remembered this recently, after going through some old journals. I've always equated my first experience with opiates with having my own full bottle for the first time. But I guess technically that one night with him was my first. Besides trying heroin with him once too. Maybe that's why I am still so in love with him. We broke up and got back together countless times. The last two: he dumped me because he found out I had a steady side job turning a trick. He rightly called me a whore and walked out, after we had gotten wasted at a Sonic Youth concert in Central Park. We got back together on the Fourth of July a few weeks later, when we ran into each other at a party on the roof of a sugar factory in Williamsburg. The Secret Machines were playing and fireworks were going off when we locked eyes and just started making out and it was so beautiful and, I don't know, young. I swore I would never turn another trick again. I dumped him for the last time not long after, on the day of the blackout. I had recently gotten my first bottle of Vicodin and we had been downing them in earnest and I had secretly gone back to making money with my side job and I knew I couldn't make a commitment to anything true. He told me this was the last time, that he meant it for real, and that if I did this there was no going back.
I counted out 15 Vicodin, put them in a plastic baggie and gave them to him as a consolation.
I hate myself so fucking much right now.