Electric Counterpoint: I. Fast - Steve Reich, Mats Bergström
I know you’ve got allergies, but please come back soon.
I started taking new hormones. Without discussing the specifics, they were an acceleration of a typical process. They came in a small white packet, sealed like a breakfast bar for your lunchbox. The intention being that this snack would give you tits. The pills themselves are one milligram. They are small, white, and easily lost. They were a new addition to the evening routine. Their packaging has a day-to-day record. Like a calendar for poorly rationed emotions, you would always stay on schedule. The first week had been taken by a mouth not my own. Though, the first Monday had gone untouched. Nobody eats Mondays. Garfieldian.
I started on the pills without problem. They were high in ambiguous, medicinal content. They had an intentional direction of use, prescribed for one reason, yet they sat on the edge of my throat for parting reasons. They sat, waiting for water to come, while I wished for growth, development and change. I took them, understanding and exacting an opposite nature from them. I was using them, not for control, but for cataclysmic change. Uncoordinated, uncontrollable, untouchable change. The change in thoughts as you feel how high the water is pooling in the shower. A distant fear of drowning. I dream with pills clinging to the back of my throat, not yet ready to go, but equally falling apart at the very seams.
I take the hormones before I sleep. My teeth are brushed, and as such, my tea tastes horrible. All a sigil of the routine taken. I read. I turn the lights off. I try not to think about sleep. I try not to think of how alone the house is. Do the british bury crosses underneath the floorboards? Sleep is coming, sleep is soon. I try to let every thought take me from one to the next. Somewhere in there, I am lost and apart.
She becomes gray mist, composed of old parts of herself. Small particles eventually left behind after long, long undisturbed nights that leave all art and all effort behind. Veritcality drowns through her world. She is nothing now, but a formless apparition, stringing together pieces of her past self. Her identity is null. She sets off somebody’s smoke alarm as she rises from one house to the next. She does not haunt. She has full, whole apathy towards the people she finds herself watching. It is easier to feel nothing, she understands, than to feel the shift in the self. To her, she is the same. But now, she sees the world in passing. It gives her dusty migraines. Her formlessness sometimes shows her hands she used to wear. She is still so uncomfortable with them. She remembers why she became this cloud of nothingness. She feels far better knowing she will be something again, eventually. She can’t remember the date. She just lets the specs move from one surface to any other. She is peaceful, she is unceremonious, she doesn’t care. The thoughts turn to her, like old memories of breaking things at a cousins’ house. Some more dust on the windowsill, unbrushed away.
I fell asleep. My bed creaks. I hate living in a rented room. I hate living alone. The isolation is killing me, but I don’t want to be seen ever again. I become is space itself. There is nothing beautiful for your eyes to see here. My body still snaps into quiet colds. The humidity is getting to me. The tea tastes of gone-off toothpaste, in some distant memory of my mouth. It’s all distant, all there was to be known.
She considers a conversation between her body and her brain and what now remains. What dialogue do they have? There are no solid words said. Lacklustre monosyllables. Some are revered, some are louder. None are quiet, but instead, the words and exchanges are infrequent. She feels what her body felt like. It is cold. The windows cannot be closed now. As she touches it, her hand on where her heart once was, parts are uncomfortably shifting away. They are melting into the air, into the heavy, humid, late night summer air. She wants to be dreaming this, but she witnesses the warping of what was once her body. The spoken unphrases are beckoning it. This is a ritual of the Body, Brain and the cavern between. The two don’t seek unity, instead, they seek separation. And she is made of dust. She asks out, ‘When are you going to wake me up?’
Mouthless, they don’t hear her. Nor will they respond.
I’ve begun to believe that something larger than a small white pill is at play here. Something unpredictable, something emphatic and excitable. This is just what that pill is doing. Nothing more, and nothing less. The effect it has is immutable. The care and empathy it has goes unspoken. The changes it makes are as equally silent. I feel terrible for the third week in a row. I think a problem has emerged. I take two pills at night, because I missed a few days. I wanted to miss them, hindsight speaks to me. I’m up to my neck in mulch. The bubbling earthiness is up to my neck, and I can’t find my conditioner. I know its possible to drown a little less. Instead, I feel hollow without the conviction to be better.
I know you’ve gone to get some ice cream, but please come back quickly.
There is a return I can make. Some forbidden way back. I’ll leave them half used, half abused, half ignored. A week that stops today. They have done bad things to me. I believed I was right, like some half-completed teenager. Now, once more, I look for myself. I look for who I am, wherever I may be. I know I am lost. I am up to my mouth in broken water. Over time, the water will take me apart, and soon, take me away. I look forward to it. Maybe down the line somewhere, I will reconvene.
She knows it will not be happy, nor will it be peaceful. Her body will crack and croak and make rusty noises in tinnitus ears. Still, she tells them how unspeakably beautiful they are. There is a search needed here. She will look, I will find, and drown a little less.
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