For years, Elisabeth had felt dead inside, as if her internal landscape was a bleak and barren November afternoon. She was stunned by the trauma endured in her teens, and nothing helped; not the care of her family or her friends, or a long succession of various doctors and therapists. Then, in a group therapy session for PTSD sufferers, she met Andreas, who had kind brown eyes, trembling hands that moved her, and a blossoming heroin addiction. He helped, and the heroin helped, too. Those first few years with Andreas were one big high, and the darkness of her early twenties finally faded away in Elisabeth’s mind and heart. Elisabeth and Andreas were the sexy kind of addicts, they used to joke; he was heir to a salmon farm fortune and could more than afford to fund them and access quality heroin. They lived in a beautiful apartment in central Oslo, and socialized and went to art school and loved each other deeply, but with time, every aspect of their lives became increasingly dominated by their love affair with the Big H. It began to show. People started to ask questions. Their families grew concerned, then suspicious, then horrified as the scope of their addiction became clear.

Though Elisabeth still doesn’t consciously allows herself to return to the icy January morning five years ago when she woke up next to a dead man, the man she loved, those moments are always with her like a backdrop to her mind. Overnight, she was evicted from Andreas’ apartment by his family. She had no job and had dropped out of art school several months before. She was thirty-four with nothing to show for it except a body full of broken and bruised veins. Her family tried to help, Kristina tried to help, the welfare office tried to help, but within weeks, Elisabeth was living in a hostel and working the streets, reeling with ever-increasing use to dull the grief. In those days, just being felt like falling through endless layers of hot burning air, and every night, lying on the hard hostel bed, coming down from a high, Elisabeth would be bombarded with gruesome images of giant needles plunging into frail veins, blood splattering to the ground, guns pointed in faces, the hairy backs of another faceless client, Andreas dead, his soft brown eyes open and staring straight at her. The only thing that helped, was the only thing that had ever helped – the intensely warm, euphoric lull of a clean, strong hit of smack.