Vicess - Princess of Vice

It's like those first few seconds when you wake up, but less confusing, like you're suddenly entering a different reality again... something familiar, or something shocking, depending on the hit. And just like when you first wake up, sometimes the words trail out of your mouth without you even intending to speak them, like you're finishing a sentence you said in a distant dream. And similar to in your dreams, you have what seems like a fuzz of uncertainty around everything that happens, not everything makes sense but you don't really mind at all. You don't mind about much, it's hard to force emotions when your senses are dulled to relaxation. It's like waking up in the middle of the night to find that the person you usually sleep next to isn't there this evening, everything moves slowly and people come in and out without you even realising. And your eyes are loose and tranquil, a sleep needed for slumber.

So, we take drugs to feel like we are asleep. And once you've felt that life, you don't want to be awake anymore. Real experiences seem so slow and dismal to the mind.

He hates it when I revert to my older ways. A fairly simple man, he is most content with a computer, a game and a pack of 20 Benson & Hedges. He doesn't like me to distract him while he immerses himself in his games, and it reflects his need to be unbothered throughout his life.

There have been occasions, since he fell in love with me, when he has held my hair back as I vomit. He's always been patient and understanding. In the darkness on the first night that we had sex, I crawled out of bed and smoked heroin as he lay waiting for me to return. At this point he was silently unhappy, as he felt he had no cause or right to be openly angry at me. He was merely appreciative to have a female body to hold, whether she was here or in a different realm of reality.

He hasn't spoken to me since yesterday, when he found me lying on the bathroom floor at lunch time, looking like an idiot, most likely with saliva drooling from the corner of my mouth and my eyes half-closed in a gormless fashion.

"For fuck's sake," he barked, shaking his head and storming out.

"You knew what I was when you got together with me!" I screamed out after him, pitifully, perhaps feeling remorse but being unable to retract my movements.

Because when I'm unhappy, I am a fool. I am so set on destroying my life that I simply do not care.

But this is what I do. I recover, I live, and then I slip back again.

But when I feel normal again, I will resolve to let that be the last time, at least for now, for a few weeks - just so that I can have Jack's friendship again.

I don't forgive myself for the black hole in my timeline that I can't recover. Sometimes, I wonder exactly what happened during this period, whether I missed anything important, whether there was a smile that I should have remembered, or an important life lesson that I should have learnt.

Instead, I came out of the other side without even acknowleding that there had been a black hole at first. In the rehab clinic, the nurse told me that I was lucky to be alive from the amount of heroin I had consumed. "You won't believe how many addicts kill themselves just by not knowing their limits," she said.

Yes. I actually do.

But there was some point in my life where I knew that heroin would kill me one day, and I just hoped to God that it would be sooner rather than later. I went on a manic path of destruction, killing every shred of life that I had along the way.

I met Jen at a strip club before I had even progressed past cannabis. She was a pole dancer, and a dear friend to my dear friends, and I was mesmerised by her. I sat in awe while she shimmied and shook around the pole, and in my drunken state, I thought she was Angelina Jolie - her long brown hair shaking raunchily behind her, her luscious lips pouting suggestively. I was not a lesbian, but at that moment, I thought I must have been.

I was obsessed with her for weeks following our first meeting. Her confidence and charisma radiated from her in ways that made her, to me, an untouchable sex goddess. I knew that she was promiscuous just because of her job, she was paid to be naughty. Yet, I was positive she wouldn't be for me. And it drove me crazy.

Many things happened between, but on one particularly sad day, Jen grabbed me by the hand and told me that we had wasted enough time. This wasn't in reference to the lack of sex that we'd had. It was in reference to the time in life that we had wasted trying to sober up.

"Let's just do it," she said. "Let's go out with a bang."

The plan was to leave this place and go somewhere new, where we would spend the last few days of our lives in obliterated happiness, barely able to crane our own necks from the ground with the heavy weight of heroin lulling us into happy slumbers.

We found ourselves in a flat, "slumming it". We had all of the drugs that we would need, and we set on our suicide mission. Two days later, a pack of rogue tramps squatted in our place of death, their sleeping bags laid out at the opposite end of the room, and they huddled together as they slept to keep warm.

During the evenings, we lit tealight candles and shared stories with the tramps, listening to their tales of woe and off-loading our own.

And then it all went black. For three months, apparently. The next thing I knew, I was in rehab. I had been wandering around in life for three months, and I couldn't remember any of it. I went home to my family, I had some sex, and I even wrote some stuff.

And to this day, I have the odd flash back that I guess could be linked to the pitch-black days of my life, but I still have no accurate memories of anything that happened from the day I was talking to the tramps to the day I woke up in agony on the hospital bed, the nurse wiping my vomit from the sheets beside me as she sang "Ave Maria" in an off-tune and husky voice.

I will never forgive myself for the three months of my life that I lost and yet I found myself - just last night - venturing to a place that I knew would serve me well.

Hello, old friend.

"I have a question to ask," I said. "It's quite important to me, really."

"Sure," he answers, his eyes flicking between my face and the computer screen. Now is the time to point out that Jack has an extremely bad gaming addiction.

"Do you remember when you told me I wouldn't be a very good comedian? Why was that?" I asked.

He pondered for a moment, shrugging. "You are funny, I didn't mean to offend you with that. I just don't think women can be funny in a comedian sense."

"Then how am I funny?" I asked.

"You are eccentric," he explained. "You do good facial expressions, or you say funny things, spur-of-the-moment. Women just aren't good comedians."

"Why though?" I asked. His sexism has bothered me previously, though I'm accustomed now.

"Women are funny to other women," he explained. "You tell jokes about periods and how men don't understand you, and you find those jokes funny."

"So, if I was to be a comedian that never talked about periods or men, could I be funny?" I wondered aloud.

"No," he admitted. "I just think I will never find a woman funny."

"What about writing?" I asked. "What about comic writing?"

By this point, I was turning his chair to face me so that I had his full attention, which was quite a struggle. My need for attention, versus the computer game. I was losing.

"Could you be a comic writer, you mean?" he asked.

"Yes," I stated.

"I don't know," he shrugged. "I don't find books funny."

"Not even John O'Farrell?" I asked, flabbergasted.

"Even comedy books aren't funny," he shrugged. "Women find them funny..."

"Why do they?" I asked.

"Well, if it was a book about periods and men that don't understand, all the women in the world would buy it," he shrugged. May the record state I have never purchased a book about periods and ignorant men.

"So what about me?" I asked. "Could I write good comedy that the masses would like?"

"As long as it was about men and periods, yes," he decided. "You will only write good comedy that other women will enjoy about periods."

The first time I had a period, I was quite proud. I ran in to my mum's bedroom, and told her about the new guest in my underwear. My mum has always been quite proud of her menstruation, telling anybody within earshot, so I thought we would bond.

The next day at school, a spotty boy pointed as a small speckle of red blood on my granny tights and made a huge declaration: "She's on her period!" It seemed that by the end of the day, every person in the school had been made aware of my menstrual cycle. Girls who weren't as developed yet were the worst, thinking it hilarious to call me rude names like "Jam ragger" and "ketchup minge". I cringe just at the thought.

So don't blame me if, on my first attempts at comedy literature, I don't choose to write about periods.

School consumed so little of my time as a teenager, partly due to the low level of attendance that I had, and the amount of my days spent "playing truant" at home.

It wasn't always intentional. Sometimes, I would wake up in the morning, wait until my parents had left for their full-time jobs, and then decide on a final twenty minutes or so in bed until I had to walk into lessons. I would wake up at lunch time and decide that it would be worse to be so ridiculously late than to miss the entire day.

Eventually, it became intentional. After so many successful dodges, I knew exactly how to miss my lessons without being reprimanded. And I had my friends - a couple of years older than me and either unemployed or laid-back college students, and of course my new drug addiction, which almost definitely contributed to my need to be lazy and uneducated. School just kept me occupied and away from the moments in life that I felt most essential to my happiness.

But eventually, letters were sent home, and it was only for so long that I could put a spin on the situation, or trick my parents into thinking that it was days that they had allowed me to miss. Soon, my mum was driving me to school each morning - a last ditch attempt to get me into my lessons on time.

Sometimes, I would go to school, smoke heroin in the toilets before my lessons, and then sit bleary-eyed and semi-conscious whilst teachers tried to teach me. Other times, I would wait until mum was out of sight, slump over to the bus stop, and then pay a fare to take me straight back home, where I would spend the day nourishing myself with poison and intoxicants until my parents go home to find me in deep slumber, strung out from the day behind.

Yet, nobody caught on that I was a junkie.

I believe, on my parent's part, that it was sheer selfishness that made them ignorant to my habits. My father was a drug user himself, smoking bags of cannabis each evenings, clouding the lounge in a haze of sweetly scented smoke. My mother was an alcoholic, though not overly so, but she would easily down a bottle of wine or two each evening. They despised eachother, and this ritual was the only way that they could cope with their own marriage. But this escapism that they found only allowed my own problems to go unnoticed and masked behind the piles of wine bottles and overfilled marijuana ashtrays.

On the school's part, it was ignorance. They didn't want the school's ratings to fall, it was a highly reputable school that were close to becoming a recognized business college. They didn't want to have to deal with the extra funding that they would need to investigate the situation, to see how far my corruption had spread.

It hadn't spread at all. Not once while I was at school did I attempt to make friendships with any of the others in my year. On numerous occasions, girls would try to speak to me, mostly to ask about Dom and the others that met me at the gates. Curiosity, they said. I saw darker motives. If they knew about my relationship with Dom, understanding it to it's full extent, they would try and seek out the pitfalls or problems and exploit them to their best advantage.

They didn't think the shy and unsociable girl that nobody liked deserved a boyfriend as attractive as Dom. They thought Dom was an older boy, probably had a car or was at least having driving lessons, and maybe even had a job to buy them presents. He looked quite old, so if they were with him they could probably get into night clubs. And he was a trophy boyfriend, that they could wear as a handbag until he got boring or the relationship demanded they actually made an effort.

I hated them. I hated the boys that followed them around like puppy dogs, desperately hoping for their attention. I hated the teachers. And I hated everything about school.

So I was not happy to find Anicka at Kit's house, four years on from my school days, randomly dancing into my life.

She was in my biology class, she had an unusual need to know all of my secrets. We had argued on a few occasions where she had tried to make me respond to her during lessons. She had never learned anything about my life, but she had informed me on numerous occasions that she had been telling "the others" that I was quite nice after all, and that we were "quite good friends". I had hated her like I hated the others, only I hated her a bit more, because she rused my from my drugged sleep during lessons.

Anicka was the kind of girl that gave blow jobs in the boy's toilets and then bragged about it afterwards. I wonder if any boy ever touched her back, perhaps to make the deal a bit more fair. Anicka was quite proud of the fact that she had given over ten blow jobs at the age of fifteen. When she lost her virginity on her sixteenth birthday, she told me that blood filled the bedsheets and her mother knew instantly that she had been deflowered, as she was walking uncomfortably with her legs open for the next three days. She gave me the rather graphic details of the bruising between her legs. I was traumatized and horrified at the imagery.

When I saw her there, four years later, she had just returned from a date with Kit. She was his calibre of girl, and I knew that they were a match made in heaven, but I was still surprised to find her there.

The first thing I did was thank her, as if it hadn't been for her and her gorey "first time", I probably would have started having sex a lot sooner.

I state for the record now, as I have never made any blatant reference to my teenage drug abuse in previous posts, that I am in now way proud or condoning of what happened to me or the mistakes that I made.

Cole was the first of us to see past the excitement and drama of drugs, and she stated, "I want out before it's too late".

She had sparse communication with her alcoholic mother, but during one of their very sporadic phonce conversations, her mum had advised her: "Right now it's a habit, don't let it become an addiction."

So Cole had taken her own methods to kicking drugs. She stayed up late, researching different ideas and tips of ex-junkies, and had written a list of step-by-step instructions for herself. The first step was the eradication of temptation.

I, and others like me, were seductresses of a class A nature, and we were the first to be quickly shut out of Cole's life. It had been a tear-filled, sob session as Cole had informed me that she "wouldn't be seeing me for a while". But she vowed that when she was stronger, or when I was "better", we would see eachother again.

Two nights later, I find myself at Dom's house party, smoking bag after bag and snorting line after line, sadly reminiscing and staring at an empty chair (which had no particular relevance to Cole), imagining that she was still with me. But eventually, the empty chair was blurred and then it was out of sight, as I lay on my back slowly drifting in and out of existence, listening only to the horrified noises of my more sober friends, "Call her mum", "Call an ambulance", "Call Cole"...

I felt Cole's gentle hands lift me from the floor, and I can remember little else after that, although I know that I eventually ended up in her bed, vomitting and blacking out, in an almost comatose state for two days.

When I finally awoke, Cole was crouched at the side of the bed, a deep sadness in her eyes that informed me (without words) that she was back. She had been weak, most likely for fear of my death.

Unfortunately, I had little time to console her, as I felt an aching migraine burn and suffocate my brain, and needed air of only the freshest quality. The nearby hills, though we referred to them as mountains, was where I headed. And when I returned, I never did remember to apologise to Cole for sending her back over the edge.

When I travel to foreign countries, I promise to myself that I will view all that there is to view, I will spot all that there is to spot, and I will ask all that there is to ask. I prepare myself like an obsessive traveller, purchasing expensive beginners guides to the native language, or tourist guides to the cultural hubs of the country. Yet, when I visited Holland I did no such thing, for I suspected I would be without urge to see anything beyond the walls of Drizzle's home, and indeed I was correct.

Drizzle booked only one day's holiday for the duration of my stay, though this didn't halt my captivity. I could have requested the freedom to wander in my regular manner around the Dutch towns, as I had only visited Amsterdam once as a younger teenager, accompanied by a couple of friends, and had seen little past the art galeries and Anne Frank museum. I longed to peruse through the shops, and stroll through the evening X-rated streets of sexy clubs and bars.

But I was happy to accept the destiny that Drizzle had determined for me.

It was a particular evening that I look back upon and feel that burning excitement in the pit of my stomach.

Drizzle had a work's party with friends, and opted not to invite me, instead leaving me at home, alone. I was left, handcuffed to the radiator, nude and alone. Still buzzing and stinging from the demoralisation that had occurred before she had begun preparing for the evening ahead, I was left in almost darkness with nothing but a dimly lit lamp to allow me to see the photographs laid out around me. Drizzle, donning sexy dominatrix latex and fishnets, various poses exposing her toned and tanned body. My lower lips clipped open with laundry pegs and a vibrator pushed inside me, whirring away.

When she returned at midnight, she was intoxicated and smelled faintly of cannabis. She undressed before me, telling me about her evening, not asking how I had been. She asked if I would like to be uncuffed, to which I simply smiled. She said, "Don't be so rude, I was offering to do you a favour," before grapping the whip from the bedside table and lashing me four times across my right hip.

Whipping her pants aside, she thrust her pelvis into my face, demanding I pleasure her orally - the vibrator still whirring inside me. I happily obliged, appreciating the juices after a long evening of dehydration. After several ecstasy-filled minutes, she pulled away, crouching beside me and playing with the end of the vibrator, making it adjust positions within me and reaching spots it had been unable to reach all evening. The sensations that had become almost numb suddenly gained new life, and it was all I could do not to moan.

She did this for only a few moments, before stopping abruptly and harshly ripping it out. She thrust it into my mouth, demanding: "Lick it clean" to which I did with pleasure, as my own taste pleases me.

She asked if I would like to be uncuffed. I was hungry by this point, following my four or five hour stint attached to the radiator, and fancied my freedom, so I pitifully nodded. She giggled slightly, reaching to uncuff me, before suddenly slapping my face brutally. "Tough luck," she smirked, before pulling on her lilac silken dressing gown and bending in to kiss me erotically.

Flicking the switch on the light, I saw her silouhette moving gracefully across the room, climbing onto the bed and pulling the cover over herself. The hunger beginning to ache inside me and desperate sickness causing my chest to throb, I rested my head against the wall. Within minutes her breathe had deepened and she was asleep, and my only thoughts were that I didn't care if she didn't uncuff me in the morning.

I was thrilled to be suffering in such a manner to the point that I didn't need to see the photographs, or to feel the vibrator inside me, I was orgasmic enough - just from the memories of the hours before - to thoroughly enjoy the entire evening of sleep deprivation.

I started playing World of Warcraft when I was a few months away from my eighteenth birthday. I enjoy the social elements more than the rest, and the roleplay. It allowed me to make friends, new points of contact.

There were two girls, both night-elves, a priest and a hunter. We made a channel for the three of us to talk.

They were both open lesbians, though Drizzle (the priest) was less so than Nedula (the hunter). Drizzle had been in previous straight relationships, and retained a strong element of feminity. They differed in weight, hair length and beauty. But overall, their personalities were strong opposed. Drizzle was sweet, polite and friendly. Nedula was blunt, outgoing and sensitive.

I found myself drawing a strong attraction to Drizzle, and found myself admitting my innermost sexual desires to her. It wasn't much at the time, although I had by this point recognized the fetish inside of me, and was well aware of my need to submit to another. I told her of my submissive desires, and she confided her dominatrix habits. I fell.

A month later, Drizzle planned a visit to the UK from her Holland home. She asked if, during the second week in the UK, she could make a stop at my home for a few evenings. I considered, pondered and contemplated for days before telling her that I would have to decline. I had imagined the moment that we would meet many times, and decided it inappropriate to meet on my territory. Much for the atmosphere of control, I felt I needed to be on her territory.

When her trip to the UK was over, she purchased an plane ticket for me. She didn't tell me until she had already purchased it, but she knew me well enough by this point to be aware that I had no home commitments to attend to. She sent me the email, with the confirmation of the booking. A message:

"You will catch this plane. I will see you when you arrive."

When I arrived in Holland, I was met by a stern-faced Drizzle. She took me by the arm and nodded, without saying a word. Before leaving the airport, she took me to the girl's toilets, pushed me into a cubile and handed me a package, before closing the door behind her. I tore it open in anticipation, to find Chinese packaging - a chastity belt.

I equipped it uncomfortably, extremely aroused. She knocked on the door, asked if I was done. Yes, I replied. I opened the toilet door, she stepped inside. Clasped on a padlock, locked it with the key.

"Until you leave for the UK, you are my property," she smirked, before gently brushing her lips against mine.

I gazed at her with adoration. I knew this was the beginning of an amazing holiday.

Even though I don't believe Dom and I ever loved eachother in a romantic sense, it was definitely "true" love. I was so connected with him, and there was a bond of years between us. We had bought our first bikes together, we had been to our first swimming team together, we had even been in the same Boys' Scouts platoon. We knew everything that there was to know about eachother, and even though separation was difficult when he was accepted to one school and I another, we had quickly adjusted our journeys to involve meeting - even briefly - every morning and afternoon.

I often dream about him, asking me to go back to him. It has been hard for me over the last couple of years, to accept that he is no longer in my life, and this has been evident in my dream life.

I often dream about Kay too, the girl that he eventually ended up with. I dream that they are still together, walking hand-in-hand in town, before Dom spots me. He comes to me and we spend a dream together, doing dream-styled things that aren't really possible, fading in from one location to the next and talking in a disjointed manner about peculiar things. Towards the end of the dream, it is evident that he regrets being without me, and I am drawn to him once more, ashamed that it should make me so content that he wants me again. Dom tells me he wants me back, and I am happy.

They aren't nightmares, but I do wake up with a lingering feeling of misplaced excitement, pining for a dream boy that isn't there anymore.

So, I spent further hours thinking about the book today, whilst I lay in bed attempting to recover from the soul-destroying virus that's seen me lying around in discomfort all week.

Jamie was a prostitute, though she never used the word and would spurt a mouthful of angry obscenities just at the implication. The fact was that she had traded sex for money (or drugs) on numerous occasions, but only with men that she already knew. Tony was the first man to offer - her dealer - that she could give him oral in exchange for a large dose of brown powder. And she, as by far the most addicted of the group, couldn't decline such an offer, and took it up frequently afterwards. He wasn't the only dealer that she had, and he also wasn't the only dealer that she made these trades with, yet because she wasn't part of an agency, and she didn't have a business card posted in a London phone box, she considered herself purer than pure. She was not a prostitute. She had just had sex with a few guys for money.

And I know that she felt demoralised afterwards, even though she would claim that she would have fucked them for free, because her personality started to change. She was more volatile than before, and she would find herself bursting into explosive rages at more opportunities than ever. What used to be a fairly bad temper became a problem for all of us, something that we would have to avoid seeing her because of, something that would make us fear for her own baby son's life during numerous uncomfortable evening discussions.

I tend to believe that, in trading what is deemed such a sacred act of self-worth with other men, she abandoned the only shred of her own personality that kept her sane. She lost her sense of identity. She was anybody's girl, so long as they would trade for the right price, although this was on numerous occasions (as far as Tony was concerned) just one hit. That was enough to see her on her knees, dealing pleasure to a man that was slowly killing her by feeding her addiction for "free".

She and Owen were in a long-term, committed relationship, but even that couldn't survive this new development in events. Owen was naturally jealous by nature, and his protective personality was perhaps the only thing that kept him with the tempestuous Jamie in the first place. He didn't mind that she was on heroin because he had the job, he was paying the wages and it was his cheque that was funding her addiction. She would never jeopardize such a fortunate opportunity, or so he thought. When she started to sleep around to get drugs after he lost his job, his alcoholic demons fought back with a vengeance, as did his anger issues that he had so carefully supressed after months of stress management support meetings. The two of them would display cuts and bruises of broken ashtrays, splintered wooden chairs and sovereign-clad fists, that told of a depressingly dismal tale of two lovers that had lost their only connection.

I sometimes cry at the thought of their son, lying in his cot at night as his parents slowly slaughter eachother.