I was 16 when I smoked my first joint. I was 18 when I snorted my first line of coke. I was 19 when I first tripped on acid. I was 20 when I stopped keeping track of my firsts. Life from then was a hazy far off memory. Every moment felt like déjà vu. If you’d ask me to recollect something, I’d get that subtle nag at the back of my brain telling me to try to make the effort, but there would always be that overwhelmingly oppressive cloud subduing me. ‘Why bother?’-it would say. ‘Exactly, why bother’ my mind would whimper back.

I had nothing left. My so-called friends were the limp bodies around me settling into their daily mental orgasms of shape and color. They would also be the ones who would sell me in parts just to buy some more. Every sober awakening was a painful reminder that I wasn’t high. I’d crawl around whichever filthy hovel I was in at the time, to look for overdosed corpses whose stuff I could steal and go back into my coma.

There were several times that those who cared for me tried to help. Emotion, guilt, rehab, I went through it all. It never mattered though, because it would always end up with me half dead somewhere with my pupils resembling the deep dark hole they were trying to pull me out of. Eventually those who did care, didn’t care so much anymore. They continued with their pathetic existence and left me to mine.

I wondered why I kept going back to it and near the end of my life I realized it was probably because that was the beginning, middle and end. An endless coma, a lucid dream where there was nothing but there was everything. I did things, traveled places. I created my own world and was my own master. It changed the way I changed, reflected what I felt. I was a god in my own universe. I did everything I wanted and more. Without repercussions, without responsibility. I had lived more than most ever could and I was content with my choice.

As my soul left my body for the last time, I looked back at my frail withered self and…laughed. The irony of it all! What was there to look forward to anymore, in the great After? I had already done everything possible. It would’ve been kinder to just cease existing. As my trudged up the stairs into the heavens, the God of His universe eyed me apprehensively, probably imagining his own Reckoning.

“Do you regret it at all?” he asked.

No. Of course not.

“If you could do it any differently, would you?”

I smiled- No.

He seemed perturbed. “Why?”

I frowned at that. Slowly, I thought back- I don’t know. All I know is I had to, I just had to.

And you know what?
I did.