Meth Memoirs: Salt and Water

I have spent hours of my life procuring and sucking on packets of salt. When I did meth, I was always convinced that something besides the meth itself was compromising my health. I would spend hours on Wikipedia reading the list of symptoms for various ailments. I made sure to drink lots of water. Yet, my head still ached, and I still possessed an insatiable thirst. That is when I learned about hyperthermia. I realized that I had been incessantly drinking water without eating any food, without taking in any sodium.

So I snuck into the kitchen of the co-op apartment I was living in and grabbed salt packets to bring to my room. I would suck on them and, I swear, I would feel a coolness running through my body but mostly to my head. Hyponatremia causes swelling of the brain, and I genuinely felt as though I could feel the pressure release from my head.

When I was using, most of my delusions were rooted in hypochondria. My concerns of suffering from hypernatremia are tame compared to the other health concerns my psychosis invented concerns about.

I was frequently convinced that I had leprosy. I looked at my hands and arms and was convinced I saw blotches of skin in the early stages of decay. My fingers and toes were frequently numb and lesions and cuts developed across my appendages. My days involved getting high and lying in bed, so I assumed these cuts developed as a consequence of some flesh eating bacterium.

If I kept shooting up, my health concerns shifted from fear over contracting certain diseases to pure delirium. My skin looked grey and bloodless. I believed I was decaying, but not from some specific illness. There were times where I would shift my body, and I would feel as though I could feel my organs move within my body. Similarly, I was convinced that my brain had become corroded, as my organs had, and was now floating around like a pickle in a jar.

I had become convinced that I had died and that my body and brain had somehow managed to fail to register that fact. I, essentially, believed I was a walking corpse. I believed my flesh was rotting and that maggots had begun to fester within my body’s orifices. I could feel them in my ears, my nostrils, in the corners of my eyes, and in my anus. In the rare instances that I left my room and saw another member of the co-op, I was convinced they could smell my bodies purifying flesh and see the gashes in my skin where once my living body had the vitality to keep me stitched together. I would see horror in their eyes, like they knew but were too afraid to comment. I’m sure their looks of horror were not the consequence of my paranoid mind construing their faces as appearing that way; I think they were genuinely horrified by what they saw. A greasy, sunken eyed, emaciated, and tremoring 19 year old boy.

I cast away myself from society, like the lepers of the past. Any time a human made eye contact with me it evoked the same feeling I imagine a cockroach feels when a light is shone on it. I felt like Frankenstein’s monster, an obvious metaphor I know. But, whereas, while Frankenstein's body was a sutured together amalgamation of fragments of flesh, he was entirely lucid. His mind was whole. My body was fine. My mind was delusional ruminations, panic, exhaustion, and the feeling of being alien to this world due to my solitude all stitched together into a creation so unbearable I had to believe that I was dead or dying.