I seem to terrorize myself with thoughts of self-loathing, because in these moments I picture everyone crying because they cannot help me. My future self wallows in the drug use and sees nothing but pain and ridicule. This is hell: addiction, prostitution, death. All around me. I feel it hug me close, tug at my clothes, beg me for more attention as the pipe seeps belligerently nearer and I unknowingly take a hit. This is my sin: being ignorant and naive about everything I commit, over and over again. Because I see things from a distance. I'm not the one pulling the pipe in. That's someone else doing the thinking and lying and conniving and touching. And me, well I sit here on the outside looking in, looking in to a scene I have never witnessed before this moment, and I forget what I see soon as the hit leaves my lips. White-gold flames. Loss of remembrance. I erase everything when I get high again.

Every night is the first night for me. Every night I watch, every night I forget. The problem with beginning every single time new, is that you've started over. Time erased. And you don't remember what you learned yesterday. Like this; I can't even reach through the glass-like structure between my body and me, I can't even remind that girl with the pipe to stop smoking, no matter how much ridicule it causes and damage the smoke does to her lungs, I just paint over this, and that is how I forget about it.

Every crime is the same, though there is no tolerance from others, I keep doing it again... and I paint over what they say about me.

There must be an end to addiction, I whisper, but I can't even mouth the words to this, I can't ever say I'm done, call in quits. Because. Every night I touch the pipe. But every time it feels like the first time. Every thought that tells me otherwise is destroyed with a glance at the pipe. And I don't know any better but to watch my body through the glass, blank expression on lips and brain wiped clean of the tormenting mess. There is no reasoning. Only quiet submissiveness, every evening I begin again. I can't stop. I don't know how long it's been. I am every day, consecutively ignorant. And addiction becomes:

"I'll only try it once. Just to experiment."

"Just one time is all I need, just for the experience."

But these words I've said more than twice. I don't remember when the cycle began. I just know that when I get high, my slate is wiped clean again, and I am given another chance. But what I'm failing to recognize is that every fresh start, every new beginning, every time I let go of the images, haunting me with prophecies in which I am self-condemned, just to get high, to wipe the slate clean again, to whitewash the walls of my mind. Every clean wall gets trashed with images, so I build them up again, paint over the gaping, memories of what's happened. And every hit paints over the wall 'til I swim playfully in the oblivious nature of a self-worshiping masochist. Ignorance is bliss, and there is nothing wrong with this... The wash of naivety obliterates everything, so I have no problem with doing nothing, nothing, to stop this body from getting high again. Every new beginning brings me to the edge, to the edge where this "one time" will miss a step and go tumbling down to where beginning becomes the end. And I can't start over, I can't erase pain with smoke and paint and wallow in it. I am covered in a cold sweat. This is the beginning that could not begin again. This is the final step, cannot be repeated. Death silences ignorance, and butchers naivety in it's cradle of false idols, emotions, and images...

Images... the ones inside my head. Haunting. Mesmerized, I close my eyes within what I've taken of my last and inebriated breaths. Every night that I repeated this and tried to forget in vain. Every time I got high to kill the pain. Every time I suppressed these tears with smoke. Every time I chose blindfolds over redemption. These images will be whitewashed. These images will all be painted over with death.

It's a painting the soul never has to squirt out again, so timidly, on canvas. It feels like the greatest paint is death. And the only thing I want more than to be high, is to be dead, blank, naive of every sour memory and bittersweet fairy tale that never came true, without tears, without feelings, just floating in space like I'm real, real high... and completely oblivious.