Darkness Within. Darkness Without.

• Lachlan Stevens, Grade 11
• Short Story
• 2008

The needle slides in. A long, exasperated sigh emanates from his open mouth as he embraces the lovely poison which now flows through his veins.

Faces flash before him. Faces of the past. Faces of the present. Perhaps even a face of the future yet to come. He lets out a cry of fear. The beginning is always the toughest. The thing he is trying to escape always comes to stand right before his eyes before the escape begins.

He is weak. One who refuses to face the images before him without the assistance of some toxic, debilitating substance always is. The reasons and concerns of his friends mean nothing to him anymore. He is lost, a lifetime junkie so dependent on his substance that he simply would not exist without it. Lost forever.

The needle slides out again. Slowly bringing his head to bear on the ceiling, he notes the classic architecture of the abandoned building which he lies in.

“You’ll die if you keep doing this,” They’d said to him. But he proved them wrong. He was still alive.

But was this shadow of a life he lived really proof of him being alive? What’s left of him now? Darkness within. Darkness without. He is nothing but a shade of his former self. A tragic doppelganger.

But there was something different about this time. Something so much more calming. Something so much more frightening. His vision faded before him like an avalanche enveloping a lost mountain climber. But it did so with the same eloquence of a fine-tongued John F. Kennedy speaking in front of the Berlin wall. I am one of your own. Give it to me. And just like an obedient school child, he let his vision depart him.

He was so gripped by a Euphoria he had never felt before that he did not worry to cry out about the loss of sight which had just befallen him. He just sat, unmoving, on the urine soaked sofa of the slum. Everything to him was fine at that moment.

There was no job loss. There was no unrequited love for the woman who meant the world to him. There was only him. Him and this darkness which he injected into himself, anyway.

What’s left of him now? Nothing, but a section of tracks down his arms and legs.

His manager had seen them yesterday. Fired him on the spot. The one thing keeping him from complete and utter burnout was that job. Sure, working as a janitor isn’t glamorous. But he needed something. Some sort of paid work to keep him from death.

No feeling in his hands. What is this? He cried out in fear. But he didn’t hear a sound. He didn’t feel the vibrations. All that was left before him was a bright white, not unlike the brain synapses of a dying person firing at random.

Then he realised. He’d done too much. He’d gone too far.

He silently said his last goodbye.