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.