Chapter 43

                                    

                                          
2019, October, 14th - Monday | 7 am
Aster's P.O.V.:
For the first time in my life, waking up at 5 was a real challenge. 
So much I actually turned off the alarm and just shifted on the bed, throwing my arms over Tate and closing my eyes again. 
But you know, just like us humans, dogs are animals of habit and Tate was simply not having it. 20 minutes later he squirmed out of bed and started barking by the terrace's door, causing Brie to huff and leave the bed, bumping her slim body on the unlit candles over my nightstand and knocking them to the floor before leaving the room. 
So I crawled out of bed, defeated, even though I had like 2 hours of sleep. The sun hadn't risen yet as I dragged my exhausted body to the kitchen and made a coffee for myself, Tate happily jumping around my legs - once I was up, going to the porch wasn't so important anymore. 
In a sense, I'm kinda glad I was ripped out of bed in my usual schedule, it brought me some sense of normalcy while I sat at the porch's couch and watched the new day starting.
Although I managed to sleep just fine at Harry's, once I was alone in my bed I simply couldn't shut my mind nor control my racing heartbeats, everything I learned over the past 3 days came crushing all over me and suddenly, I started feeling out of breath. It feels like an entire month passed since the unfortunate night I decided it would be a good idea to follow Harry to that damned nightclub, not only 72 hours.
I wonder - if I knew how much that one reckless decision would change everything I know about my own life, would I have done it? Maybe it would be better if I just kept completely oblivious to what is actually going on behind the curtains, things would be pretty simpler. 
Now things are so messed up! I'm sad, and I'm angry. I feel wronged, mislead, feel like a fucking idiot for living a lie for so many years, never having even suspected of anything. It's not even the moral part that bums me up. Analyzing it coldly, selling illegal hallucinogenic drugs is not so much worse as the "legal" stuff we put up within the pharmaceutical industry every day.
Don't get me wrong, my entire life I tried to focus on the good - we're helping save lives, we're prolonging the human lifespan, constantly researching and learning more about diseases, creating new treatments, developing cures. The health system would be complete chaos without medicine, that's true, but what's also true is that we would never sell a single pill if it wasn't for the right price. 
At the end of the day, it doesn't matter if we have the knowledge to save the world from diseases like cancer or AIDS - business is business and we won't do it for free. 
Look, when you work in this field, even the diseases become a matter of what is more profitable. Standard chemotherapy works for the most common types of cancer like lungs, stomach, skin, breasts, so naturally, is where the biggest part of our efforts is concentrated. Why would we invest in discovering the right drug mix to treat a type of cancer that's so rare, only 7 people in the world have it per year if we can invest in selling the standard mix to more than 2 million annual new cases in the United States alone?
Do you see my point here?
I try to compensate it as much as I can, helping NGO's, donating to independent researchers, investing in Medical School's libraries. But that doesn't change the fact that I came to realize it's all about the money ever since I was so much younger. I've made my peace with that. Does it make me an awful person? Maybe it does, but I am who I am. 
So producing and selling MDMA, LSD, and whatever more we do? Not exactly nice, but also not what bothers me the most.  
What broke my heart was to acknowledge my father is not the person he always claimed to be. All my life, he preached against drugs, always so concerned about morality and healthy habits. He was the first to condemn anything even remotely related to alternative lifestyles - dyed hair, having tattoos or piercings, flashy clothes, heavy makeup.