Diary of a Drug Fiend

Cold Turkey 231 unique. But, of course, he is not really unique in the way that I am.... We have lighted a huge fire in the billiard-room. We sleep there so far as we sleep at all. We got the waiter to bring down blankets and quilts from the bedroom, and he leaves the food on the table. But fires are no good. The cold comes from inside us. We sit in front of the blaze, roasting our hands and faces; but it makes no difference. We shiver. We try to sing like soldiers round a camp fire, but the only words that come are the appropriate ones. That poem has obsessed us. It fills our souls to the exclusion of everything else except the thirst. “Every separate bone Cold, an incarnate groan Distilled from the icy sperm Of Hell’s implacable worm.” We repeated them over and over. ... I don’t know how one thing ever turns into another. We are living in an eternity of damnation. It is a mystery how we ever get from the fire to the table or the two big Chesterfields. Every action is a separate agony rising to a climax which never comes. There is no possibility of accomplishment or of peace. “Every separate nerve Awake and alert, on a curve Whose asymptote’s name is ‘never’ In a hyperbolic ‘for ever !’” I don’t know what some of the words mean. But there is a fascination about them. They give the idea of something without limit. Death has become impossible, because death is definite. Nothing can really ever happen. I am in a perpetual state of pain. Everything is equally anguish. I suppose one state D.D.F. Q