traceyh415

"What's the worst thing you've ever done for drugs?" he asked me.  He took another bite of his food. I feel like I am being interviewed for a job I'll never get. If I tell the truth, he is sure to reject me. If I lie, I suppose he will know. I'm not sure how a casual late lunch/pre dinner with a person I met through Instagram has turned into an interrogation of sorts. It's not a date, more of an initiation. Can I meet the standard qualifications to fit into role. It's as if I wouldn't want to be in any club that would have me as a member but social isolation is also a mother fucker. The truth is flexible. You don't have to lie. You can simply chose to omit the truth. Did you quit using? The correct answer is yes I did (but I started back again). Did you rip me off? The correct answer is no (but my boy did and we split the difference). Do you love me? The answer is always yes. I just happen to love/d drugs more. He presses me again, not sat...

THERE IS NO MAGIC FORMULA. Ok, thanks for letting me get that out of the way. So- you want to quit dope? Or maybe you don't. You want to cut back? Or maybe you just want to be safer? (fuck I hope so). I don't know what your goals are dear reader. I just know you have to have something positive going on in your life outside of powders or brown sticky substances. There is a scene in the movie "Black Tar Heroin" when I was doing laundry. I asked the filmmaker when I got sober, why am I doing laundry. Pretty much anyone who knew me knew I would pick up clothes from the street, a thrift store, or just wear the same damn outfit for a month before I would bother to do laundry. He told me "all you ever did was get high- we needed footage of you doing something else". I cringed for a minute. Then I realized what he was saying was true. My whole life revolved around the obsession and compulsion to use drugs. The obsession in that drugs were pretty much all I ever ...

Heroin Saved My Life. Story time. Pull up a warm fuzzy blanket and some sour patch kids. Young Tracey was not the Tracey you know today. I was full of insecurity. I had gotten involved in a relationship with a man I barely knew. He swept me off my feet with his constant attention. He was also kinda sort of homeless. He had nothing else to do. He told me he loved me and fucked me ten different ways. He then told me I was fat, stupid, lazy. Kept me alone in the house for days. When that relationship ended, I was just on the border of suicidal. Perhaps you have experienced this type of suicidal. It isn't the post strung out suicidal when you low key wish you would die but maybe this hit will fix me suicidal. It was the type of suicidal when I actively went through the A,B,Cs of killing myself. Alcohol wasn't helping. Alcohol always seemed to amplify the worst parts of my personality. I am *almost* joking when I say a night of drinking would end in either 1. crying in a ...

Guest Post by Ickymack Look in the mirror and here I am again  Abandon sense to bandages to sample where the tragic is Self knowledge isn't self control,  I sit with sticky swollen skin and candles lit  Like  I can't fathom how I got back here  Rather save face than save ass  In a soft chair  Sinking slowly,  remote control me Rewind and maybe,  just maybe we could've stopped there.  I try to tell myself that it's not fair  But deep down this beat up bruised and confused spirit believes its exactly what the fuck I deserve,  Suffer the world Stutter for words  Covered in cuts in a puddle of isopropyl night terrors  Shudder and curse.  Because I said I was never going back there  Said I was never coming back here  But here I am again,  Broken and beat  Licking dots of warm blood from my elbow crease  A Marlboro pleads me to seek its relief  I...

Chicken and a 40 from the corner store Glass pipes with a rose in it for my gal Graffiti on the sidewalk from a Pentel The smell of rotten food on a hot summer day Homeboy playing Parliament in his 49ers gear The pigeons all gather for a piece of my tortilla The ocean so cold, the train is so warm The dealers ask me "que pasa mammi" Fog rolls over the hills I'm nodding in my friends(?) car Cotton fever givin me chills Antibiotics and a Nestle quik chaser I tried to call home but you didn't answer I tried to fall in love but I have nothing to offer I have this room and you have a clean outfit Tap on my shoulder while I pick at my skin I read a book by William S Burroughs. I'm the authority on vices and sins. Let's go record shopping while it's still ironic. I'll be RIGHT back with your money. 3,2,1,... A pack of Newports and a dream please A Mountain Dew to swallow my lies My blue eyes pinned to the wall behind me An alcohol ...

my wife loved blackberries. i had never noticed how they grow everywhere here. on the side of the road, under bridges, in the cracks in the sidewalk. you can’t avoid them and i try not to. they say it gets better.  that the passage of time erases the loss. i pray that that is not true.  i can no longer remember her laugh, or the sound of it. i can no longer remember the sound her chest made when she inhaled. wrinkles around her eyes that grinned in unison when she was surprised the feeling of cold sweat on her nervous palms when we hadn’t seen each other in a few days her feet shuffling to the hallway in the morning and it’s perfect cadence are all also gone. they say that everyday it hurts less but this pain in my chest the feeling that i still can’t completely catch my breath my terror that this may all be true and the horror that it is indeed my empty rib cage where she fit so perfectly even on the most sleepless of nights  are all but ...

I can hear breath go in and out or is that the sound of a lost cause? I feel my lungs expand with the ever present doubt that they will fill to the brim with the oxygen I need to survive. I can hear the blood rushing through my ears. Pulsing like an electric shock through to my teeth. My heart beats inside my head like the faint tapping of the police at the door. Yes I can hear all that banging. I barely see the people walking by, gazing down at me. They provide me with a passing glance as they pour a handful of soil into my grave. Walking by, judging my position in life- six feet under, five bags deep. I feel them slip the oxygen into my nose. Into? Out? I'm confused now. I feel the cold stainless steel against my air as the push me into the back of the ambulance. I see the scrubbed white walls as the wheel me down the hall. I try to reach up but I am shackled to the gurney. "We are taking you into surgery now. Count backwards from 10, 9, 8..."I feel the prick in my ...

The blonde hooker with the black eye reaches for her bear claw while the man in the piss stained clothes shuffles by, headed for the sugar. It's that period of the twenty four hours that make up a day when the brutal realities of life are hidden away from the pedestrians known by normal folk. The darkness veils the stark truth of life on the fringes of the city. The florescent lights of the donut shop are a magnifying glass, revealing what the naked eye generally avoids. As the man fills the coffee cup he pulled off one of the tables with what seems like an endless supply of sugar, I focus on my apple turnover. "Dude," my friend yells as she tries to fan the smell away from his nose "how can a person live like that?" He takes a sip of his coffee, a watered down hazelnut blend. It is hot, steaming up his broken glasses. The arm no longer exists on the right side. His ego has given way to a utilitarian desire to see. I point to the clock "that dude is w...