The room is hard to make out, even with lights. You squint to make sure it’s yours, panic a few more seconds, eyes darting, for a long time you are not sure. The mattress is uneven beneath your spine, sharp needles of pain bite random places; waist, lower back, shoulder blade, neck. This is familiar, reassuring. A flat screen perched on wooden boxes a metre and a half beyond your left ear, rope strung across the furthest end of the room, four metres from where your feet protrude off the bed – from this, clothes hang like withered bodies. The walls are bare unless you count the forked lightning cracks. A single, old chair is hunched in a corner opposite the bed. Assorted objects lie on the exposed concrete floor, too numerous to mention, and although you cannot see them their presence is felt, and this too brings comfort. You relax against the flat, non-existent pillow, breathe a lengthy sigh of relief, close your eyes and count yourself lucky. You are home.

A wave of nausea follows; your body remembers. It surges and recedes, a strong tide, and your bed is the raft, the scattered objects at its foot, everywhere, bobbing flotsam. Your head begins to pound and there’s a heavy feeling in your gut and you know what is doing this to you, what you have done to yourself. It is the scrap on your tongue. It is your tongue’s connection with the glittering silver and black scrap in the plastic bag. It is the scrap that looked like sparkling ashes and felt as you imagined grit might, when the sharp taste of pharmaceutical alchemy filled your mouth and dissolved on your lifeless tongue.

It was. It is.

You are trying to sit up, but the drug has become a gravitational force. The light in the room sways with movement. You have bumped something, probably the lamp. You try to raise yourself again, to prove something, and eventually after some struggle you make it. Somehow, some deep instinct, a part of you, already knows. That something is urging you to rise into a sitting position, pause, push with the balls of your feet, stand, rock forth and back, steady yourself, eyes closed tight, wait for the ebbing to pass.