The Pill Diaries - Week 48 - Shez Hough

WEEK FORTY-EIGHT

In Recovery by shezhough

8-5-2022: Day 333

I was following the watercourse down the River Adur winding its way towards Bramber Castle on a beautiful Sunday morning under the expansive blue skies of Spring.

Feeling jaded from the psychological shadow battles terrorising my psyche from dawn to dusk, in the cold turkey stages of withdrawal from Big Pharma experimental monkey pills, I waved my right hand over the tips of the beautiful white flowered weeds blooming along the riverbank pathway.

When, from nowhere, my awakening consciousness was drawn to the street kids throwing stones at a white swan on the watercourse, triggering an avalanche of melancholia upon my raw and scarred soul.

Plugged into my music playlist of Lockdown, troubled by the unfolding scene, the shuffle picks out ‘Heavy Soul,’ as Weller anchors the moment in time and space.

I wondered how this Lord of the Flies social savagery would play out for this future generation, taught in lyrical dog-eat-dog ‘beats n’ bars’ from the cradle to the grave.

And, as I crossed the Bridge Back Homewards, all these ill communications were carried southwards down the River Adur towards the enigmatic infinity pool of the North Atlantic ocean.

9-5-2022: Day 334

Driving along the A259 coast road, westbound towards Worthing for a pressing counselling pow-wow with the Finnish Angel, I was cruising in fifth, high on the good vibrational elixir of the Island’s premier youth radio station.

Then the mood changed. I could feel solace and solitude opening in the deep blue ocean reaches beyond, as I was pulling up alongside the flashing amber lights of the ambulance van and squad cars. A small clique of people were hunched over a corpse-like body lying twitching by the kerbside. And, frozen in time and space, I drove straight past, gripped with a fragile sense of my own mortality.

An hour later, in the healing room of the Finnish Angel, I was undergoing a little soul surgery, exploring life’s traffic roundabouts of grief and loss, when my thoughts cast back to the body by the roadside.

Once again raising the thorny dead-ended question of the afterlife. And, whether the soul journey ends on this mortal coil, or whether our karmic credit score will ultimately seal our escalator ride to heaven or hell.