It’s always just one.

Just one. And as the smoke hits the back of your throat, massacring the very lungs that carry the nicotine to your blood, as the spinning hits you, but only sometimes. That unexpected flight makes you forget the hacking cough in the morning. You forget the smell that attaches itself to everything, creeping like a fungus from your two fingers to the clothes you wear. All for one, possible headrush.

Just one more pill, that last shot for nirvana. Any addict will tell you – it’s just that last one. One and done. But as your pupils eat the colour of your eyes, and the music starts to reverberate in a way you’ve never heard before, that promise is forgotten. Watching the bouncers, knowing they know, as your teeth grind relentlessly on one another so much your jaw is unusable the next day, all else is forgotten. Because your fingertips are glittering and your feet forget the floor they are walking on.

Just one more hit on the pipe, one more chase of the far too elusive dragon. As the surroundings around you become less habitable. As the people around you care less and less, and that speaker system at your dad’s looks easier and easier to grab and sell. All because when you do it, you forget all of those pesky problems that seem to flutter away like technicolour butterflies. And the limbs that would ache, the brain that would scream, disappear into that same abyss.

And all of these things. I’d take every one, as the sunlight bores through my eyes and burns my optic nerves. As I sweat in my bedsheets, my teeth shake and my very bones seem to need to escape from the prison that is my skin. As the hair pulls away from my scalp, and the cramps cripple my legs and stomach. As my heart beats out of my chest like a cartoon in love. All of these things I would gladly take.

For just one more drink. A cider. A half shot of vodka. God, even an amaretto. My tongue feels too big in my mouth, and the water I drink doesn’t seem to go anywhere, as if my chittering teeth are alive and suckling like newborns before the water can reach my gullet. But I promised her. I can’t disappoint her again.

The knives glide through her skin and through the fat protecting the vital organs I’m trying for easily, yet I know the shakes are ruining my aim. I fucking told her not to make me promise again. My anger chips the knives on her bones, and the horrific suction sound her body makes as it grasps at the very blade killing it bounces in my head. My muscles ache, and I have to stop.

Just one more, I think to myself. One more and she’ll be dead, and I can have that drink. And the screams don’t hurt as much any more, my muscles cooperate. Just one more.