See You Bleed | ✓

XXII

When you do cocaine for a prolonged period of time, your brain develops tolerance.

If three grams used to be enough to give you the dopamine rush and get you high some months ago, then you're gonna need five grams now. And then six grams. And then seven grams. Until one day you finally overdose and die.

Your nose loses its ability to smell. Sometimes it bleeds. You lose appetite and become extremely skinny overtime.

Paranoia and anxiety are ever-present. Sometimes you experience delusional parasitosis, a condition under which you feel bugs and insects crawling under your skin. It makes you scratch your skin until it bleeds. Not the best feeling in the world.

Sometimes you even get cocaine-induced panic attacks and hallucinations.

But the worst thing is probably losing sensitivity of natural sources of pleasure. Your brain gets used to extreme amounts of dopamine to indicate pleasure or satisfaction and you get extremely depressed and suicidal when you try to cut cocaine usage.

That's what I suspected happened to me before Max came back. I knew people who completely lost any ability to feel pleasure and happiness without the white powder, and now they are six feet under.

I accepted my fate and anticipated to never wake up again after every blow for the past two years. The tragedy, is that I always did.

But now I feel frustrated because he can make me so damn happy. He managed to become my most addictive drug in such a short amount of time again, I still don't know how that happened.

I should never have let him back into my fucked up life again.