20-8-2021: Day 70
The crucial schoolboy error was the two mugs of strong coffee at 5pm. It was to be a twisted fire starter of a night. Determined to go one night without a sedative, I lay in bed at midnight watching the candle flicker in the breeze, as the lights went out around the house. I was wired. A caffeine excess kind of wired. And as I lay there, I grew more determined not to reach for the white wicker box of state sponsored medication.
As the hours ticked by, it soon became a game of the poacher becoming the poached, as I waited in the dark for the darkness to manifest. For the fires to spark.
When the darkness descended, I felt it surge, raw and untamed, over every inch of my body. Sparking a firestorm of my mind, the Voice hollered out then faded into the night.
A dream came in the dawn hours: of being lost, looking for my halls of residence as a young student, but finding only a huge Arthurian castle in its place.
22-8-2021: Day 72
So, I slept through the true-blue moon. The rare moon hanging in question – hidden behind the shock white clouds of the night sky – in the hour before I lay my drugged-up head down on the pillow.
Once down, down-and-out. Since going large on the medication, aside from the last diary entry, I have been sleeping like a comatose man, suffocating between the walled corridors of my dreams, waking later in the mid-morning with full-on woolly head syndrome. And once up, I hunker down into the day like a regular Big Pharma zombie.
The drugs have exorcised the demon for now. Or so the psychiatric illusion goes. The demon being the Blackheart Man – the name I give to my psychosis or Voice of Damnation – who brings me out in hives with a hint of a whisper or full holler into my left earhole.
I wait, like a traumatised sedentary fly in the spider’s web of my life.
25-8-2021: Day 75
Walking along the River Adur – as the gravel crunched underfoot and my in-laws dog Paddy buried his head in the hedgerows – a solitary thought occurred.
My mind, body and soul are exhausted. Exhausted to the point where every passing thought is dripping like liquid lead, every step becomes a step through muddy quagmire, and every flight of my core being is tethered to a rusty ball and chain.
These drugs are really cramping my style. My flexibility. My flow. My mojo. My way. One of my biggest fears, apart from the slate grey sky falling on my head, is the medication castrating my creative juices – that one sobering day, I will wake up with a shrivelled-up brain that no longer spunk’s up words for days.
And, as a flock of seagulls depart from the airport lounge mudflats of the river, Paddy meets his canine clone of a lab-collie cross and starts racing around in circles under the dark shadows of the colossal steel and concrete underbelly of the Shoreham flyover.