High highs and low lows

I wake up with a searing pain in my forehead like an axe is splitting my skull in half. Drool coats my keyboard where I fell asleep on it the previous evening. "Fuck," I murmur to myself as I lean back in my chair with a sigh. My back is stiff from being in the chair for... how long? I look at the clock. It's only nine in the morning.

Then it hits me. My senses, they're back to normal. But normal is shit when you've experienced what I experienced, and my heart starts to beat rapidly at the thought of how addictive this **** could be. Did I just sign myself up for a heroine knockoff? I look down at my hand, and I realize I had subconsciously pulled one of the pills in between my fingers and was rolling it between my fingertips. Fuck! I drop it back onto the desk and recoil away, standing up from my desk and stumbling backward. I trip and fall, landing on my ass with a loud thud that shakes the floor. "Shit, this is rough. The highs are high, but damn if this doesn't blow now," I say to myself, as I sit up and rest my head on my knees. I take a deep breath in, then another.

A knock on my door interrupts my thoughts. "Hey, Dom? Are you alright in there? I heard a noise from downstairs." Mom. No doubt worried about me, her ****-using fuck-up son.

"I'm alright, Mom. I just tripped getting out of bed," I lie, and stand up. I open the bedroom door to see her standing there. Her blonde hair hangs in loose strands for once, but she's otherwise wearing her usual ensemble: a pair of burgundy yoga pants and a matching sports bra (or tank top, I don't know). "See, I'm fine."

"Alright," she says, her voice worried. "I'll be downstairs, then. Why don't you join me for breakfast soon, since you're awake? The girls are already gone for the day."

The thought of having Mom yell at me while I have this mind-numbing headache is not a good one, but I have no real reason to tell her no (that she knows of, at least). "Okay, I'll be down in a few."

She smiles and then disappears down the stairwell.

"Shit," I murmur, closing the door and turning back to my room. I need a second, just a second, to think. I think about what happened the previous evening, all of the knowledge I learned and the project I worked on. To my surprise, I can recall a fair portion of it. About as much as if I had learned it over a year naturally. "Holy shit, Brad," I say, looking down at the pills again. Did I really, actually, for real, learn the entire first year of Harvard's computer science program in one night?

It doesn't seem possible. It really doesn't.

I sit back in my chair and open the code project. Despite remembering most of the knowledge from my studies, I have a hard time thinking through the code. Maybe I'm too stupid, or maybe the pill just made me that next level. I don't know, but it is disheartening. I could probably dumbify the code to make it easier for my sober mind, but it would take forever to do.

I look down at the remaining two pills, then at the clock. Around sixteen hours since I last took a pill. Fuck it.

I grab the second pill and downed it before I could convince myself to do otherwise. And just as before, it hits hard.