With what lies ahead it almost makes me feel guilty that I know that I will be alright, that my life, while changed, will be okay, and that I will continue to find myself early in the mornings having been awoken by the sound of birds and leaves rustling outside my bedroom window, that life outside of myself will continue to go on. And still, I cannot shake the impending sense that this is all only a calm before a storm. Life; which I believe to be circular, well, sometimes the old wounds come around again too, and some mistakes cannot be taken back, even the ones we have no control over.
I can hear the rain pouring over the roof of the house and I find it so soothing, I adore how it makes the world seem a little smaller somehow. For the past few days the spring rain has been steady. But on this morning, about an hour before the sun will rise, my attention and the beat of my heart are only beating a little faster because of the sound which accompanies the beauty of the falling rain, a low roar of rolling thunder is humming along the horizon, I cannot begin to explain the effect that it holds over me, or why I’ve always been at my most peaceful and most restless, most primal and most humane than when it storms. I doubt I ever will. I close my eyes.
Now that I have had a few days of much needed rest I can return to a state of introspection, funny that, funny how I never really leave that place, nobody ever really does, that little voice of you is always present, always filling you with doubt, with fear, with love, with hate, with pity, with pleasure and with pain, the mind is both a cage and a place without walls, and mostly mine is filled with poetry and horror, pity and rage, roses and arsenic. Thorns and thistles abound the waking world. In moments the world around me is little more than a series of still pictures, as though I lacked the animus to do little else than to observe and muse thoughts that will never mean anything to anyone other than myself, for I never give voice to what it is I really feel, even to myself and that’s the most tragic thing about it. And even if I were afforded the time and the medium in which to do so, I’m not sure that I could, if I would, if I could ever lay myself bare, truly.
I linger outside and shut tight my eyes to breathe in that intoxicating scent of the night air after the rain. Something about it stirs something within me, a little voice that aches to be moving if only for the sake of movement, to let my compass point north and nowhere else, I can almost see myself taking the steps through the endless bog, trekking through the badlands, how the terrain changes from mud to stone to a seemingly infinite row of trees along the horizon, the air will become thicker, the world will grow both smaller and larger in the very same breath, miles from anywhere, where there are no houses, no roads, no dark places to hide where people cast the burden of heavy shadows. The further I would go the more I would shed of myself, of what I’ve led myself to believe was me, in time I would be stripped of ego, and yet somehow I would be left with the only thing that I fear most in this world, I would finally know who it is that I really am after all. I look at the bright light of the moon as it is swaddled in the listless clouds, tonight I do not even gaze upon the stars and only contemplate moonlight.
I turn the bottle amid my fingers. The bottle has been empty for a little under a week. Tomorrow I will get yet another little, green, plastic bottle and it will have just enough pills to line barely a fifth of the volume of the bottle itself, there will be sixty pills in all, I am expected to take two of the sixty pills each night for the next thirty days until again I will have to have the bottle filled once more. The pills themselves are small, circular, orange in color and act a sedative, in fact, they are a low dosage of a medication used to control psychotics or people afflicted with similar afflictions. The two pills that I will take will put me into a state of dreary and foggy sleep, and when I awake I will roll onto my side, search the dark of my room for a lighter in which to have my first cigarette of the day, after which I will sit up and use whatever I have left in my canteen to wash down two more pills, one will be oblong in appearance, larger than the antipsychotic, a brighter orange too, and along with this pill I will take a larger blue pill, also oblong, both have the same metallic taste that I always make sure to let sit on my tongue as though it had some kind of placebo effect which is funny because I can assure you that they are both medicinal in nature, it’s these pills that regulate my mood and keep me from sinking into that familiar abyss of the mind known as depression. This has been my ritual for the past two years, since the accident, since I had different pills in my system that were washed down by about twenty or so ounces of whiskey, where I can still recall losing control of the vehicle as it began to swerve on the highway in the morning in Canada, and that was followed by the bursting glass and then I could see only the face of the rock as I sat upside down in the driver’s seat before I unbuckled it and crawled out of the vehicle and stumbled down the road as a small group of onlookers tried to help me before I laid eyes on a green van filled with a family of five, two young girls and a boy with their parents, a family of five that I could’ve killed with my foolishness. I know all of this, I carry it in my heart and in my head and yet in the past few months I’ve been drinking again. Am I weak or do I just want to feel that way?
I won’t be sleeping tonight, again, in a few hours the sun will rise, the birds will begin to chirp outside of my bedroom window, the wind will spill in from off the lake and the day will begin anew. Only the day and time itself will be just as it always has been for me, elusive and perplexing. And maybe someday I will be an old man sitting in my chair as my mind begins to shut down as I watch the world around me continue to go on. Maybe I will have more answers than questions or vice versa. Maybe I will have found peace or learned to hold the moments of peace within myself as I am learning to do so now, this very moment while I sit and go over the thoughts in my head in this life that leads me. I close my eyes for a moment before they open again.
