Each day, my pain was getting worse, and I found myself taking more and more pills than I was supposed to, both painkillers and anti-convulsion meds in an attempt to curb my seizures. Originally, I would take two painkillers every four hours and one anti-convulsion med every six, but now I was downing them like tic tacs. My body was weakening, but in a way, that was a good thing. I was close, so close. Soon I could rest in peace.
“Twenty bucks for a dose, and I’ll give you an extra ten for a clean needle and to help me set up. My hands are too shaky for something like this,” I said, standing in an alley in town.
The sky above was gray with a gentle snowfall pouring down on the dealer and I. Luckily, the café to our right kept us out of the wind. The man before me looked to be in his late twenties, unshaven with deep distrust in his eyes. I was a new customer to him, and normally he would have turned me away on instinct, but luckily I looked sick enough to pass for a hardened user.
“Let me see your hands.”
I held them up, letting him see them tremble. With every nerve ending in my fingers firing, my hands were shaking so badly that it looked like I had MS.
“Alright, fine. You’re in luck, kid. I just got some brand new syringes yesterday and I’ve got one left.”
He looked around to make sure we wouldn’t be seen and then took out his merchandise. Filling up a spoon with heroin, he clenched the handle with his teeth and used his hands to hold a lighter and protect the flame from the wind. Slowly the powder melted into its liquid form, and before it could cool, he unwrapped an unused syringe and filled it with the drug, finishing by handing it to me in exchange for the cash.
“Tch, luck. If luck were on my side today, this needle would end up killing me.”
With the dealer leaving, I sat down on the cold wet ground, pulling up my sleeve and looking for a vein. It certainly wasn’t hard; my skin was as thin as paper and my arteries were all swollen from malnutrition and the strain of my disease. I pushed the needle into my arm, not even feeling it amongst the billions of other painful pricks tormenting my body. I hesitated with my thumb on the plunger, wondering if this was really the route to take. My life was already cut short and the chances of there being a cure for my pain were slim, but did I really want to further burden myself with even a single injection of this toxin and risk developing an addiction? After all, the pot had been a dismal failure. What chance did heroin have of helping me? I concluded my hesitation with a laugh, deciding I didn’t have much to lose.
I pushed down onto the plunger, filling my bloodstream with the poison. Casting the empty syringe aside, I leaned my head back and stared up into the snowfall, waiting for the drug to take affect. Could I possibly be any more pathetic? Sitting in a back alley with heroin running through my veins, trying desperately to free myself for just a few moments from my disease… It was beyond pitiful; it was shameful. But soon, the drug began to take effect, numbing my senses and bringing down my pain to a dull throbbing while leaving my mind spinning. Waiting for this dark miracle to truly free me from my agony, I stared back up into the gray sky and let my mind wander.
Is there a god? I ask myself that question often, but of course, so does everybody. I don’t know if I am a believer, an atheist, or just an agnostic. I see no reason in the world, no meaning, no pattern behind the chaos other than the patterns humans try to create. Is there a purpose in any existence? Even mine? Was I created with this body simply to suffer? Was I created and then abandoned, never cared about by whatever deity might have cursed me with life? Was all of mankind created to suffer or was it created and then abandoned? There is so much pain in the world, so much agony beyond my own. What kind of twisted god would put us on this earth to live as the abominations that we are, caught in evolutionary limbo? Would our creator not also be our parent? Shouldn’t they try and protect us from harm? Are we merely entertainment? A TV show for more advance life forms? Or are we little more than a bacteria colony growing on a discarded test tube, created by accident and never acknowledged?
What use is there of a god in this human world? Either he doesn’t exist, doesn’t care, or is he a sick freak that loves to create life solely to toy with it. People waste their lives praying and begging to some bastard in the sky to change their lives, all the while trampling under everyone beneath them and casting judgment upon those who walk different paths. But for judging them, am I no better? Do I have any right to speak badly of people when I too am cursed with this pathetic human body? How can I condemn others for being judgmental when it means being judgmental of them?
I guess that’s one of the main problems of this world: no one can create change without doing exactly what their opponent is doing. Whether it is trying to stop a genocide or get a bill passed through congress, every stand is just a repeat of its failed predecessor. Everyone thinks they know what’s best, they think they have the key to saving the world or that they have seen the truth that no one else has so much as caught a glimpse of. All the same mistakes are just made over and over again, all the same promises spoken and never fulfilled, all the faults of others pointed out by those who are nothing more than hypocrites. If this life really is the work of a god, then he is a sadistic god, a life where the tallest societal structure is nothing more than a pile of rubble, a mountain of failures all stacked up on top of each other with no one capable of escaping their mantle.
I don’t know if there is a god, I’m not sure whether or not I want there to be a god. If there isn’t a god, then all this is meaningless and there is nothing for us in this world but a quick life, an unavoidable death, and an eternity in which no one remembers us. If there is a god, then he is either incompetent or evil, in which case, I want nothing to do with him other then a chance to pay him back for creating me. What am I? A believer? An atheist? An agnostic? What is the name for someone whose belief in God is nothing more than the desire to kill him?
“Marcus, I’m cold.”
I looked over, seeing the girl sitting next to me, her healthy skin contrasting against the brick wall and the snow-covered pavement. She looked at me with somber eyes, pained by the condition I was in and how desperate I was.
“Do you even feel things like the cold?” I asked, more bitterly than I meant.
“I feel them because you feel them. You are my link to this world, just like I am yours. We are bound.”
I got to my feet, struggling to maintain my balance. “I’m sorry you’re bound to someone as pathetic as me.”
“You are not pathetic. You are desperate, you are in pain, and you are starved of love.”
“Who could ever love someone as broken as me?”
“I do. Marcus, of all the people in the world, I am the one that you have nothing to hide from.”