HOROSCOPE OF A TEENAGE SPEED QUEEN
All hail! Curtsy, lords and ladies, for your speed queen. High bourgeoise of amphetamines, stimulant debutant, this modern American girl doll reeks of rot and platonic yearning and relapse. Nose pressed to the sink counter, she revels in disapproval, expects disappointment, serves to please a god she hasn’t yet discovered. She brushes her hair with the Milky Way but the ends still split, a new multiverse halo, and she glows, but in a way similar to 7/11, or a heart monitor, or gasoline. The moment you start loving her back she hates you, ever fearful of the unnatural- faulty judgment, she supposes, on your behalf. How is she supposed to trust anything else you do? A dog from the pound only knows the warden.
When they talk to you about addiction in school, under harsh fluorescents in a sticky hard desk, they tell you only half truths - described through the lens of amateurs, middle aged balding P.E. teachers who’ve never experienced it first hand. With gnashing of teeth they’ll wave around words like psychosis and overdose and HIV, spoken over grisly pictures of abscessed meth addicts and stringy heroin users, but they won’t explain how people get there, giving you the impression that you’ll know when you’re addicted to something, and it’ll feel like a choice, like something you can quit.
Nicotine is easy. Easy to use, easy to get off of - the rattle of your brain behind your eyes, the numbness of your face, the delicious pull of menthol. Remnants of a red lip on the filter, cigarettes are sexy, you’re as addicted to the behavior, the aesthetic, the commitment to the jazz-noir character as you are to the burning tobacco. You can go months without. You can cry because you want one. You can smoke so much you don’t smell it anymore, and you can go outside and be met with the overwhelming orchestral symphony, the newfound ability to hear the burn of every cigarette in the nameless neon city.
Stimulants are harder. In the class of drug as well as the practice, it burns going up, sometimes seeping through the soft palate in the back of your throat and gagging you with the harsh bitterness of the lab, like dandelion stems or licking batteries or getting hot sauce and vinegar painted on your nails as a child in feeble attempt to stop the biting. The designer high of amphetamines is long and ruthless, wiring your jaw shut and sideways, sucking all the moisture out of your mouth, peeling the eyelids back as far as they can go. The woman you’re met with in the mirror is beautiful, strikingly so, but her face is gaunt and empty as a stick of butter, pupils blown like olives. Speed is dangerous because it gives you a shard of the truth, divinity baked into a mud pie, it embeds into your dopamine receptors and your brain identifies this as the part of you that’s been missing. It gives you a voice you didn’t have before, energy to breathe, but it brings you closer to the edge, slipping off, urging you towards that dark sucking vat of nothing. Months later, under a cold wet blanket, you’ll reflect on a few of those nights through the taste of blood, abject horror at how close you were to death.
The comedown is so bad it almost convinces you to stop. Flat backed on the couch, or the hardwood, or bathroom tiles, shaking so bad you’ll soon shoot into space, manually pumping blood and inflating your lungs. Guzzling orange juice like it’s a lifeline, you’ll worry your friends, as you’re rendered unable to eat, speak or stand, trying for the cold comfort of a cigarette and puking at the nicotine. You are not the only person in your life that your addiction affects, but somehow everyone else is aware of it except you.
This is the cold, brittle truth of addiction - it happens like a freight train, before you can even realize, in a way so inconspicuous and fluid that you don’t even notice. Soon your sense of smell is gone like it was never there, the puff of smoke that remains after a candle. The shackles never leave, unfortunately, omnipresent either in the heavy clank of metal or the angry red imprints left behind. Forgiveness is not even something you can bring yourself to ask for, opting instead for acts of service, making dinner and brushing hair, like a dog dropping a dead bird on the doormat. The infinite mantra of sick and hostile self flagellation, that you will be better, not for yourself but for them, so no one will ever have to get that call, or haul you up the stairs, listen to you cry about monsters they can’t see,
You will be at your parent’s house for the summer, sitting alone on a freezing pew in the two room country church. You will not be able to pray anymore. The rosary burns a mark into your collarbone, white hot, and you don’t have to say anything at all, leaving the space in the air for the hum of the furnace and cicadas. If god knows everything, then surely he knew about this - surely he willed it. Lucifer had to fall and such, and apparently, so did I.
Sam Backlund-Clapp, 19, Amsterdam/USA ✯
“Sam Backlund-Clapp is a student in her final year at the University of Amsterdam, the lead on her chain planted in rural Middle America. She likes using chopsticks and writing on napkins. Substack: 4 leaf clover, 3 cheerios, 2 of spades.”