I am walking up the road, my brain has no idea of what is going on but my body remembers the way home. I am not scared but I know this is not right. I hear voices, I even see people and they are talking about the concepts I know, it’s something I heard before, but when I turn no one is there, just the night, the breeze, a wobbly feeling in my legs, in my chest... I am still breathing, so I keep going.
I walk in and K’s light is on, I observe the yellow coming through under the door, I want to knock and ask him to stop this. I’m in my room, I don’t remember how I got here but the light is just perfect, blueish, calming, eternal; I wish you were here. I realise that you will still be somewhere there when this is over and that gives me a sense of peace, followed by anxiety and my incapacity to accept the fact that I can rely on someone and it doesn’t mean I depend on them.
I force myself to have a shower, maybe I can wash this off, I just need to make sure the water is not too hot, I can do this, I am doing this; I wonder if serial killers feel like this after a murder, they’re probably scared at first, shocked, space out, then it just becomes a habit, you wash off the day, the blood, you cash in, that’s all that matters. I’m cold to the bone, wrapped in my towel, thinking of burrito cats. Pathetic.
I text K and tell him I want this to stop, he says it will wear off pretty quickly if it was good gear. I don’t think it was good gear. I’ve never felt like this before, I’ve never felt this emptiness filling the air around me, erasing my dreams, violating my body, the bad kind of death. I turn off the light and try to sleep; I know this is not forever. I can’t stop thinking about Goya’s nightmarish paintings, I am astonished by how good that visual horror describes my thoughts and my feelings. And then I sense the deepest, the scariest, digging, drilling, banging feeling: the void. I have no soul, it’s drifting away into Space and it has no message to carry, it will just refract from sun to sun to sun to another sun, and it will reach the planet you are on and you will feel nothing. Nothing, like I never existed. I’ve never touched the vacuity in my heart because I didn’t know it had room for nothing, and I would have never felt this way if I didn’t meet you and that’s fucking tearing me apart and that is so... beautiful.
I am calling you. Hey, you say, hey, I say, I don’t feel too good. You are sleepy but so steady all of a sudden. This calmness is shocking to me... I remember M on the phone, years ago, me crying desperately because I’ve been sexually harassed in the street, again, and he is upset with me for even telling him what happened because he is in another city and can’t do anything to help me or prevent that from happening again; I think that’s normality, because I am used to that.
So, why so calm? In control, a hundred and seventy hours by feet separate us and you act like you can help me. I realise it’s because you took four hours of your time to teach me how to gain my control back. I talk nonsense but you know who I am. Your voice has this stabile and constant flow, the pressure wave widens only when you laugh, I am high as fuck but my ears are still functioning, and it doesn’t take much work for my brain to realise that this is precious. I am not scared anymore, the void can’t hurt me, I can pull this through and I could have done it myself without you... But it’s so much better that I didn’t have to do this alone.
My body is still buzzing and god (yes?) knows I want you inside, and my mind is pulsing to this cosmic countdown, and I don’t have to explain or apologise or feel ashamed, because before I have the time to breathe out, you’re there, you are inside, and it’s the moment I realise I don’t need any control because that’s literally what I am made of, and what I’ve been craving for as long as I can remember was just myself. I can feel me now, I can feel me through you, a little bit like when you stand in the middle of a hurricane and everything becomes so clear, or when you sit on the top of a mountain with a canyon opening to you and you realise you are part of something bigger but you’re also alone. And that’s ok.
You wanna cuddle, a bit?
What?
Nothing!