The speedball you’ve just injected contains enough heroin and crack cocaine to last a week. The comfortable numbness of death is close to you now, engraved on your face with a needle-like precision. You don’t stop – won’t stop – can’t stop… It’s almost over. You should know that it will end this way.

You tell yourself the biggest of the lies, and you’re far away from reality now. “This is just to get through the day,” you say, “till there’s enough money for an apartment.” But then you spend the cash again and again, wasting your chances and the little time you have left. Nothing has any meaning for you now.

You see it in your dreams and even you know that you’ll be dead by Christmas. All dressed in white, the pawbearers will load you into the hearse and carry your coffin to the cemetery. You’ll lay beside me in the family grave, a line of multi-colored Christmas lights around your head stone.

You say you don’t want to hide, but that’s what you always do. You awake as the church bells begin to toll.