Coming down from a caffeine high is perhaps most painful when you're underslept and desperately wanting to not be where you are.
Time slows and, along with everything else, every detail you want to avoid strikes your nerves with the starkness normally reserved for the drum sound on an album recorded by Steve Albini. I'm sitting here, the warm air dripping around me in a syrup of dust, sunlight, and the smell of chocolate, gathering on my skin and spreading inescapably. I'm sheathed in it; it seals over my eyes and makes everything else look like it is in pictures, which is, to say, clear and sharp when stationary but hard to capture effectively in motion, and it never quite looks real--close, dangerously close, but still improper. I'm forgetting the rest of my body south of my chest, trying to concentrate on this keyboard and succeeding only at that.
I'm sluggish, I always am when it's sunny but right now is twice as worse, I'm trying to get my brain working by thinking of anything--Reykjavik, Allie, Melanie, music--but all I get are sentence fragments that require all my concentration just to string together in these sentences. I think I'm itching but I suspect with equal conviction that it's just my hypochondria, combined with my intentional detachment in fear/anticipation of the results of my blood test, telling me that the dust particles in the air are really living creatures burrowing into my skin and penetrating me to the marrow of my bones, sucking the life out of all my cells and making them their own, and I'm too tired to sleep and too scared to be awake.
It occurs to me that my diminished sex drive in the past couple weeks and lack of appetite suggest a downturn corroborated by my lack of appetite. I've been able to force myself to eat with guile, tricking myself into emotional attachments to things that I can readily exploit; Voodoo, the Roxy, Nicholas's, but I'd be just as fine without them, just as I'd be equally fine without the lunch I forced into my gut. The sex drive is just as curious; I don't want the act so much as the attention and approval, I'm desperate now, what with Allie happy with David and me surprisingly and unexpectedly still emotionally invested in that (and sorry, rest assured I'll only mention it here). I can eat, I can fuck, I can sleep, but all things leave me nauseous and frustrated more than refreshed-
-and I'm not sure if it's just because things have changed or because my perceptions have changed,
-and I'm not sure if it's just because I'm seeing things clearer or because I'm deluding myself in a different, more believable way.
I'm worried that I'm using everyone, or maybe I'm worried they'll find out and leave me when they realize what kind of a person I really am.
But maybe this is the dream that it feels like. I'm wishing on the weight behind my eyes that moves with the thump of my pulse in my ears that this will collect into a sensical stream of sensations, and soon.
Time slows and, along with everything else, every detail you want to avoid strikes your nerves with the starkness normally reserved for the drum sound on an album recorded by Steve Albini. I'm sitting here, the warm air dripping around me in a syrup of dust, sunlight, and the smell of chocolate, gathering on my skin and spreading inescapably. I'm sheathed in it; it seals over my eyes and makes everything else look like it is in pictures, which is, to say, clear and sharp when stationary but hard to capture effectively in motion, and it never quite looks real--close, dangerously close, but still improper. I'm forgetting the rest of my body south of my chest, trying to concentrate on this keyboard and succeeding only at that.
I'm sluggish, I always am when it's sunny but right now is twice as worse, I'm trying to get my brain working by thinking of anything--Reykjavik, Allie, Melanie, music--but all I get are sentence fragments that require all my concentration just to string together in these sentences. I think I'm itching but I suspect with equal conviction that it's just my hypochondria, combined with my intentional detachment in fear/anticipation of the results of my blood test, telling me that the dust particles in the air are really living creatures burrowing into my skin and penetrating me to the marrow of my bones, sucking the life out of all my cells and making them their own, and I'm too tired to sleep and too scared to be awake.
It occurs to me that my diminished sex drive in the past couple weeks and lack of appetite suggest a downturn corroborated by my lack of appetite. I've been able to force myself to eat with guile, tricking myself into emotional attachments to things that I can readily exploit; Voodoo, the Roxy, Nicholas's, but I'd be just as fine without them, just as I'd be equally fine without the lunch I forced into my gut. The sex drive is just as curious; I don't want the act so much as the attention and approval, I'm desperate now, what with Allie happy with David and me surprisingly and unexpectedly still emotionally invested in that (and sorry, rest assured I'll only mention it here). I can eat, I can fuck, I can sleep, but all things leave me nauseous and frustrated more than refreshed-
-and I'm not sure if it's just because things have changed or because my perceptions have changed,
-and I'm not sure if it's just because I'm seeing things clearer or because I'm deluding myself in a different, more believable way.
I'm worried that I'm using everyone, or maybe I'm worried they'll find out and leave me when they realize what kind of a person I really am.
But maybe this is the dream that it feels like. I'm wishing on the weight behind my eyes that moves with the thump of my pulse in my ears that this will collect into a sensical stream of sensations, and soon.