Sixteen: Sweet reminder

"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.

Twelve: Acid

Saturday night was my first experience of LSD, aka those little paper tabs a quarter of the size of a postage stamp that taste like shit but promise awesome things.  Or so I'd heard.  My boyfriend recounted fun times communing with ducks on a previous trip, and my brother, on hearing about what I had in the freezer informed me that the guy who came up with quantum mechanics was apparently on acid. 

I suppose I wasn't so lucky.  M decided not to join me since he's on a shit load of risperidone and lithium and didn't want to risk another psychotic break, so I took it all on my lonesome.  Probably a good thing, since I needed someone to interrupt me when I became fascinated with skulls on the pavement and decided to experience a cat's eye view of the world by slinking around ninja-stylee with my nose to the floor.  It was nowhere near as intense as I'd expected, however.  After an hour of little more exciting than shifting colours and floating 3D bubbles as I lay flat on my back staring into the ceiling lights, I decided to take another tab.  Still nothing much.  Except I felt stoned, and my stomach started to hurt.  A lot.  I also had a go at my boyfriend for the "misogynistic" music that was blasting (okay, playing quietly) out of his speakers, and informed him that I knew the real reason he wanted to take me to Poland this summer was to fatten me up and feed me to his family there. 

At ten o'clock I decided I wanted to go out.  At least, I thought I did, but changing my clothes and applying makeup proved to be an ordeal and a half.  All my imperfections were magnified, though I felt at once outside of and hopelessly trapped inside my body.  It was like dressing an ugly misshapen mannequin.  Our plan was to go to a sushi restaurant and then onto a club in Covent Garden, and as we walked out of the house my legs (which I'm usually relatively okay with) became tree trunks and my skin looked decrepit and old.  M informed me that I was hungry and that my stomach would stop hurting once it had some food in it - I had explained to him that he had to tell me what I was feeling, since he knew and I had no idea. 

We ordered sushi and sake, which I ate though I had no appetite.  My stomach still hurt and a muted nausea ambushed me in waves.  Then we headed out.  I did a lot of thinking on the tube.  Since dropping the acid my thoughts had hardly stopped, and it wasn't altogether enjoyable.  It wasn't at all that I was immersed in them, I was very aware that they were products of my own mind which I accused myself of conjuring to torment myself with, over-intellectualising being a curse of mine at the best of times. Silhouettes of kissing faces morphing into different shapes and ages swam out of the seat in front of me, much like the body suits in A Scanner Darkly which we'd seen the night before.  Looking down at my scaly, aging skin I had a sudden realisation that I was living myself to death - the smoking, the worrying, the anxiety, the anorexia, the vomiting, the carving my arms to shit. The last three don't perhaps apply at present (I am a healthy weight now, haven't made myself sick for 30 days and counting and have cut once in the past three months) but this did not prevent me from berating myself for past sins.

Then I had an alternative vision, one of complete health.  My mother appeared in this image, gleefully caressing my plump white, slippery body, owning me as she might have in the womb.  This of course was no less horrifying.  It came to me that all I have done to myself, all the stripping down and the scarifying was a futile attempt to escape this other, consuming kind of death.  Death lay at the end of both possibilities, both of the courses I had available to me.  This was a rather depressing thought.  We got to our destination and I made it onto the platform before my legs gave way on me.  Whether this was a result of the acid in my stomach, dehydration or the strenuous yoga class I had put myself through the night before I'm not sure.  But M convinced me that I wasn't dying, and we got to the bar which was actually pretty cool.  It was a place called Foundation, which has incredible interior design and seemed to me to give off friendly vibes.  I felt the love, so to speak.  We had a long island ice tea cocktail, which was served in a teapot alongside a token chocolate digestive and custard cream.  There were other drinks served in jam jars which also looked interesting, but we moved onto to another club before I got to try them.

It was a good night, eventually.  We got home at 5 in the morning.  But it might have been better without the drugs.