We were worried, uncomfortable people sitting in a small, tight room. There was little else to do; we got high. The world was, to us, a boring and intolerable maze of bank tellers, wheat bread, street names, and sore feet. Time was the enemy, but not in the visceral sense - while in war and conflicts of similar breeding, time worked against everyone, speeding along quickly and bringing misfortune and damnation, for us it was a cruel infinity. Nothing came with the rising of the sun but pain. Every day consisted of twenty-four hours that had to be passed in some way, each moment required labored plans to be tricked into speeding by. And the next day brought the same enemy and it was never any weaker. Always we remained in this struggle, fighting with the day to get through it without going mad.
An irony behind our escape into drugs was that they never hurried the clock; rather, epic adventures and endless conversations only ticked minutes away from us. None of these adventures were nearly as epic or the conversations remotely as interesting as they immediately seemed, but for spare moments we forgot our enemy. Time was no longer painful. How much of it passed was beyond our reach, but at least we had crumbs to relish. I felt like a hungry Jew in Birkenau crying for joy upon receiving a rotten sausage.
I experienced - or more accurately, perceived - a number of separations from myself, from the weight of my own sense of self. My body became a large robot and I sat in the head at the Captain's chair, pulling levers and watching the view screen to determine what The Body was seeing. My name ceased to be personal to me, but was a serial code for the Body I was manning. All things that tortured me when sober became statistical in nature, and in no way connected to how I felt as a spirit. When I climbed out of this hallucination all that was left was a warm and secure feeling of tire. I needed no sleep, but the tenseness that jerked my muscles around in daily routine, swung my arm to the snooze button and put nasal anxiety in my voice, was overcome and silenced. My eyes softened, my fingers numbed, my skin glowed. I felt as if I were lying in the grass falling asleep after a Little League game...
But every so often my sobriety would sneak up on me, an ambush. I'd jerk my head around to the sound of some distant echoing voice and find it screaming in my face, demanding something. A shivering breeze coming from the window struck the sedate normalcy of my senses. Then my focus would relax and I'd squint my eyes as the image blurred back in with the rest of the smoky world. But even if it wasn't immediate I could feel it hiding in the trees behind me, its eyes shining with reflections of the campfire like a jungle cat. I had the obscure feeling of escaping a murder scene, creeping through the mist on the docks as I ran to the nearest tarp-covered lifeboat to hide. The sun would be up soon.
Back.