"Nobody Told Ya This Is Gonna Fold Ya"

“So tell me. Make me understand!” Matt pleaded with Josh as he sunk down in a chair facing the foot of the bed where the older man sat, leaning over with his head in his hands.
“I can’t. I can’t make you understand. It’s not something you’ll ever get just by listening,” Josh replied, mumbling through his fingers.
“You don’t know that. You haven’t ever tried. I’ve never had the chance. I…I want the chance. Spell it out for me.” Matt slid forward to the edge of his chair and propped his elbows on his knees.
“I do know. You aren’t in my head. You didn’t go through it.” Josh shook his head and sat up, brushing his hair out of his eyes. He stood and immediately sat again. “As much as I want you to know, this whole fucking conversation is useless. It won’t get us anywhere.”
“Try me,” Matt countered again. “Don’t give up on me. I didn’t give up on you.” The brunet’s brown eyes met the blonde’s blue ones and held his gaze until Josh dropped his eyes to the floor and sighed heavily.
“That was kind of a low blow, Matt. That wasn’t fucking fair.”
“Yeah it was. It’s just the truth. You owe me.” Matt bit his bottom lip and briefly squeezed his eyes closed at that last sentence.
Josh shot up from his seat and stood over Matt with his eyes narrowed and his fists balled up at his sides. “No. I don’t fuckin’ owe anyone anything. I may have put myself through absolute hell, but that was my choice. I don’t owe you.”
The outburst worried Matt slightly, but he decided right away to do his best to pretend like it didn’t. He was going to play it as cool as he possibly could, so he crossed his ankle over the opposite knee and looked up at Josh. “Fine. You don’t owe me. You don’t owe me or anyone anything. But I still wanna know. I want you to talk to me. You keep saying how I don’t understand and I want the opportunity to try. Please.”
Josh tipped his head back and sighed. “Okay…okay,” he said quietly. “But I’m telling you, it’s not gonna make any fucking sense.” He opened his eyes and stepped back to sit on the bed again.
“Heroin was…my everything. It was my friend, my teacher, my universe. With that shit in my life, I didn’t need anyone or anything else. It was the one drug and the one way that had allowed me to feel better than I ever had. Better than I could ever remember. For the first time in my life, my head wasn’t racing, I didn’t feel like throwing myself into traffic, dude. It was just…fuckin’ amazing. There were no hangover effects, which made it that much better, you know? If I could get that shit as cheap as I did, feel as good as I did and still be able to function? Well, fuck. Why wouldn’t I?”
Matt nodded along, following Josh’s story.
“Having heroin in my system…it just…it made me the person I wanted to be. It was a wonder drug, so much better than anything else. It made life bearable. I was actually living instead of just existing. I could get out of my own fucking head now and again and you don’t know what a goddamn relief that was.” Josh shoved himself back on the bed and crossed his legs, then looked up at Matt for his reaction.
Matt nodded again, eyes fixed on the floor where Josh’s feet had been seconds prior. “I get it so far, man. Keep talking.”
Josh took a quiet, ragged breath and continued. “The problem was, that shit, heroin, it made me feel normal for the first time in my life. But the more I took, the more tolerant I got, and the more tolerant I got, the more I needed. It was this huge vicious fucking circle that ended up costing me a shitload of money in the end. It might have been better than anything else I had ever tried, but dude…,” he said, pausing in his words to catch Matt’s eyes, “nobody told me it was gonna fold me. Nobody told me that’s what would almost kill me. Nobody ever told me how hard it was gonna be once I started really needing it.”
“Josh,” Matt started.
The blond put out his hand to stop Matt. “Wait, let me finish. You said you wanted to understand, now let me talk or I’m never gonna get through this.”
“Okay,” the brunet said, running his hand through his hair.
“By the time I realized what the fuck I was doing to myself, I was in, dude. I was in deep. I was spending a hundred dollars a week just to feel fucking normal. The guys I was buying the shit from carried guns, dude. They could sell me this stuff, but let me tell you, just talking to them scared the hell out of me. That wasn’t normal. That wasn’t what I wanted my life to be like, but I couldn’t…I didn’t…life just wasn’t worth anything without it.” Josh sounded embarrassed about that and hung his head momentarily while he mulled over what he had just said.
“Keep talking,” Matt said quietly.
Josh nodded without looking up. “I was stealing money from my parents. I even…you never should have lent me money, dude. I know I said it was for guitar strings or school lunch money or random other shit, but I was lying through my fucking teeth. I just needed to get that hundred dollars somehow and it didn’t matter how. But taking it from you somehow felt more wrong than anything else. I knew I needed to quit, but I didn’t want to quit. I couldn’t. Not when I finally figured out how to be real. How to be happy. Addiction doesn’t care who you are or who you know. It only cares that you love it more than anything else.”
“It’s ok,” Matt said, trying to soothe Josh’s conscience. He didn’t care that the money he had lent to Josh in the past had gone toward something like that. Well, he did care, but what’s done was done. He was just glad his friend was better now.
“No it’s fucking not okay, Matt. It’s not okay. I’m trying to tell you why, now will you fucking let me talk?” Josh glanced up and narrowed his eyes at the younger man who nodded silently again.
“It’s not okay because it almost killed me. I know that. I didn’t see it then, but I know it now.” Josh took another shaky breath and shoved his own hand through his hair.
“I know,” Matt said quietly.
“No you don’t. You don’t know. You didn’t see me craving that shit. You didn’t see me curled up in a ball on the floor shaking so hard that I would have given my left fucking kidney for just another ten dollars’ worth of that shit. You didn’t see all those hours I spent shivering, feeling like my whole body was on fucking fire, sobbing, begging, screaming…I was in fucking hell, dude. Hell. You didn’t see it because that happened when you weren’t around. There was a reason I disappeared for those three months, dude. I didn’t want you or anyone to see that. I was at this point where it was just impossible to get high anymore. It didn’t matter how much money I spent or how much I tried. I had too much of a tolerance and I had to let myself come down from that shit just a little so I could be happy again. So I could fucking feel something. I had to let myself fall for about three days just so I could feel normal again.” Josh gripped the front of his shirt and yanked it down absent-mindedly. “I needed it.”
Matt let out a slow breath as everything Josh was saying started to register in his mind.
“Still with me?” Josh questioned, looking over at Matt with a slightly concerned look on his face. He wasn’t worried that Matt couldn’t handle the conversation. He was worried about finally sharing every detail of his darkest secret with someone that thought he knew Josh best. He should have let Matt in on this earlier, but it just felt too soon.
“Yeah, still here,” Matt said flatly. “Keep talking.”
“Withdrawals, dude…there’s absolutely nothing good about it. I let myself go through it and it was one of the worst fucking things I’ve ever done in my life. I went through all of that just to get high again. I just…I felt like I was drowning and I needed to get air into my body, but it was such a long way to the surface of the water. I could feel it, I could see it, but I couldn’t reach it. Not fast enough. It was never fast enough.” Josh laid back on the bed and set his feet back on the floor, speaking to the ceiling. “And then…well…then you know what happened.”
“Tell me again,” Matt demanded gently.
“Why? You already know.”
“I wanna hear it again. Please,” the younger man pleaded for the second time that day.
Josh rested his hands flat against his stomach and sighed inwardly. He’d told this story so many times and he really didn’t want to talk about it anymore. But for Matt, he would. “Okay…one more time.
“I might not have wanted heroin anymore, but I needed it just because I wanted to avoid the fucking withdrawals that I knew would probably kill me faster than the drug itself did. Those seventy-two hours were the worst I’d ever experienced up until then. I didn’t wanna do it a second time, so I did everything I could to make sure I had enough money to smoke as I needed it, but only just enough for it to go to my head and never so much that I reached that plateau of never being able to feel it again. You know?”
Matt nodded once again, but Josh was still on the bed flat on his back and couldn’t see. “Yeah…,” he said quietly.
“But then…God…then I got caught by my parents. Fuck…I knew I was fucking screwed then. All those memories of drooling and convulsing with the fucking desperate need to get that fucking drug back into my system came back. I didn’t know how to tell them I couldn’t do it again.” Josh pulled his legs up and rested the heels of his shoes on the edge of the bed and laughed sarcastically. “They knew I was on one of the most deadly drugs in the world and I couldn’t come clean about telling them that I was scared to come off it. How pathetic is that shit, dude? How pathetic…?”
“It’s not,” Matt said quietly. “I think it makes sense.”
Josh dropped his feet to the floor and sat up quickly, pulling his shirt back down into place. “You do? Why?”
Matt shrugged slightly. “Because it’s what you knew. And you’d already been through three days without it. I mean, if you burn your hand on the kitchen stove, you know it’s not a good thing, so why would you willingly do it again, right?”
Josh nodded. “That’s pretty much exactly it.”
“Then what?”
“You wanna hear more?” Josh asked.
“Yeah, I wanna hear it to the end.” Matt held his hands up in a begging gesture and Josh nodded.
“Okay, but remember, this is the last time.”
Matt blinked and nodded his head. “Okay, the last time,” he agreed.
“I got sent to rehab. First priority was getting me off that shit. Second priority was working on the bulimia issue, which was actually aided by that fucking drug. I hadn’t felt hungry in months. I was a walking skeleton and everyone could see it but me.” Josh ran a hand lightly over his flat stomach as the memories came back to him.
“My first week in rehab felt like fucking torture. It felt like payback for every horrible thing I’ve ever done in my fucking life. Everything hurt, dude. My body ached. Imagine the worst fucking flu you’ve ever had in your life. My bones hurt, my head hurt, I couldn’t get comfortable. I couldn’t walk for a week, I couldn’t see straight, I couldn’t sleep for two weeks. It felt like someone turned an air conditioner on full blast, then lit me on fire every few minutes. I was nauseous before, but all of that just made it so much fucking worse. I was just…drained. Physically, mentally…everything. I couldn’t function. I spent every second of every day believing that I would have been better off if I had stayed on heroin because I was certain that coming off it would kill me faster than if I had kept smoking.”
Matt’s eyes widened but he said nothing, allowing Josh to continue his explanation without interruption.
“Detox just…it sucks, dude. It sucks. There’s nothing romantic about it. There’s nothing good about it. It’s not like they make it in the movies. It’s so much worse. Everything I willingly went through the first time just to get high again…just fucking multiply that shit by a thousand.” Josh stared down at his shoes and rested his hands on his knees. “It was so bad. So fucking bad.”
“Sounds like it,” Matt said quietly.
“In the end, though, after about two months, I was finally clean and sober for the first time in two years and that’s when I knew I couldn’t ever go back to the way things were before. I knew what the drug was doing to me, but even more importantly…at the time…I knew that I just couldn’t ever go through all of that withdrawal shit again.” The blond looked up at Matt finally and swallowed hard.
“Do you understand? Did any of that make sense?”
“I get it, Josh. I do. I just don’t know why you didn’t tell me any of this before. Why did I have to fight you about it?” Matt set his foot on the floor and stood. He moved over to the foot of the bed and sat next to Josh.
“Because it’s just too fucking hard to explain to someone who hasn’t been there. And people don’t have much sympathy for situations like mine, you know? I got myself into it and I got what I deserved.” Josh crossed his legs and continued to stare down at the floor.
“But in the end, you fought for something. You fought for your life and you got out alive. That’s a good thing.” Matt nudged Josh’s shoulder with his own.
“Yeah?” the blond asked smiling at Matt.
“Yeah, but don’t let it go to your head, you ass.” Matt smiled back.