"You're lagging Grace, you're lagging", as my boyfriend would say. I promised myself I'd write up the second opinion meeting I had last week, but something in me is resisting. Not that anything spectacular happened. I just seem to be in a sort of mental torpor where the whole issue is concerned, and I don't want to disturb it just yet.
I keep re-reading and editing my last few sentences. I am not at all sure that what I am writing is making any sense. It is my speech but I do not quite understand it anymore. In the days following Amy Winehouse's death it would be crass to suggest my own drug use creates anything like the problems attached to serious addiction, but I do have a growing sense that I need to slow things down. Tonight is the third night we've smoked pot (the Americans staying with us roll Californian joints, composed wholly of weed, no tobacco), and the first night for a while without a (in)decent amount of alcohol. Within the past two weeks I have also tried LSD and ketamine, two substances I never touched before.
M isn't right. Within half an hour of lighting up I noticed an abrupt change in his manner and speech. It's persisting and I hope to God it will lift when he sobers up, but what if it doesn't? My own cognition is somewhat impaired too, but it's as if he's in a whole different realm to me, a place where time creeps and thoughts shift like sand, burying all my distressed attempts at connection. He's silent unless I ask him a question, which he may or may not begin to answer after a prolonged pause and will certainly not finish. He stares at me, or his eyes don't move. He hears me within his own frame of reference, divorced from and contemptuous of mine.
It scares me. The M I know is just no longer there, reminding me and warning me of the possibility of a complete, future absence. The absence of psychotic mania, or the absence of any other unwanted parting. When I think about losing him, my best friend, my lover, I can't stop from crying. In losing the (nearly) complete understanding that I thought we had achieved, I lose myself. All the castles in my head come crashing down, shuddering and splitting to their foundations which vanish like scotch mist. The wilderness overwhelms me. I doubt whether my perception is accurate. Maybe it is me who cannot understand him, and maybe it is me that needs to understand him, because I am the one that has strayed from the path of reality - I have conjured this storm myself. Again, I know this may not make much sense. My words are running away from me.
I will stop now and read over, once. Then try to engage with the man in his dressing gown, pacing the kitchen and trying to see over my shoulder.
Perhaps lagging is needed after all.
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