Nicolas Sheff has struggled with addiction for as long as he can remember. Whether it be sneaking pills from his father's medicine cabinet or buying from the streets in alleyways at night, Nic's always driven for that high. Even if it means crashing with a low that feels worse than anything, and shame besieges him like a miserable, hungover fog.

He's made promises, of course, to his father. Promises that he'd quit for good this time. He's done it before; the longest streak of his sobriety having lasted a good month before his inevitable relapse. He knows it's possible, and he's always optimistic the first few days. But then the withdrawal hits, like an itch begging to be scratched, a hunger aching to be satiated.

He's been clean for two weeks. He's in college, he's made friends, he reads poetry, and it's okay. It's always okay. Until he's stuck with his thoughts and the mind-numbing simplicity of life, a dullness that the absence of substance besets him with tedium so intense and gray he craves the color that only a high can grant him.

He tried to keep himself out of the house, to stay preoccupied with college and music and drawing. He tried to think about his father's hope for his recovery, which has only grown feebler with every relapse. He tried to think about the last time he overdosed---how he nearly died, how seeing that look on his father's face after coming to in that hospital bed could never be worth the high.

It didn't work. It never did. Nic met you in college, and you smoked weed. You shared a blunt one time, and it was like he could breathe again. But marijuana wasn't what he craved. You've only ever smoked, and he didn't want to tarnish your brilliant mind.

But he got his hands on a needle. He got his hands on a needle, and it gave him everything he's ever sought after. All it took was that one needle, shown to you when you were both smoking one night in your dorm room. He convinced you that that high was unlike anything he ever experienced. That you'd never feel something so euphoric.