This piece is an attempt to render, in sensory fragments and poetic prose, the lived reality of someone navigating an altered state of consciousness. It is not framed through diagnosis or pathology, but through the textures of daily life: touch, repetition, rituals, voices, time. This is a world shaped by survival, by the sacred logic of objects, substances, and sounds that ground and unground a person in equal measure. It is not a clinical account. It is an observational witnessing of how a mind under pressure bends space, distorts time, and creates its own orbit. One that deserves to be seen without pity or judgement.
Measuring Time in Doing Things
Think word salad.
Intrusive thoughts careering around his brain, an organic pinball machine.
Unopened blister packs of pills stare back at him with lovesick, unblinking eyes, begging to be touched.
Time loops in his brain like an infinity circuit.
Each day begins with him touching his belongings, reassured by the certainty he will touch them again.
The good bits will come again: his son, a flawless jewel in a flawed landscape of madness and addiction.
But the bad bits repeat too.
Husband / defective / impotent
Son / beacon / hope / dancer
Wife / cunt / goddess / mother
Parent / elusive / unclear
Family / estranged / abusive
He measures time by the length of doing things.
Sorting his belongings takes as long as it takes to score and fix his heroin.
Nothing takes as long.
The morning lasts as long as his meds take to kick in.
His metabolism is slow.
Mornings are a series of waiting for psychotropic nirvana.
Coffee calls to its psychotic barista, becalmed by opiates but alive to the balmy notes of caffeine.
The erratic patterns of white sugar crystals and brown powder become the surface where the longest contact is made.
This ritual, repeated so many times each day, forms part of his autonomic nervous system.
It is one of the chosen substances, a substance granted rite of passage.
Glutamate and dopamine need time to fire up.
So he touches the relics of the forgotten parts of his brain, the NPCs, gathering dust on the coffee table.
In the foreground are the OGs and the GOATs.
A planetary system of crystals.
A whole universe of shimmer.
These objects need to be held, not just touched.
There are holes in the walls where they have made contact with substance, hurtling out of fantasy and into plasterboard reality.
Underneath the coffee table is a recycling centre’s dream contribution: medication packaging, strewn but not quite disregarded.
Touched, but not lingered over.
Suggestions of residue left on fingertips.
Only the central protagonists make it past the lips.
There is love and hate in this doing thing that has become central to his very existence.
It is tattooed inside the synaptic pathways, spreading chemical love and hate across his emotional circuitry.
The unwatered deserts of houseplant skeletons, always succulents because they can tolerate the most neglect, sit like organic facsimiles of their host.
Touch is wanton here.
Only their death rattle cries, from brown and crisp fronds shivering in the reluctant air, receive succour but it comes too late.
Their time is deemed infinite until he finds them dead, and they become their own graveyard of once-living things.
He turns his head to the side and looks into a middle distance that conveys tall tales of insanity.
Instructive words of wisdom elide with commands to enucleate an eye.
He rolls a cigarette while listening, deftly assuming its form.
A repetition compulsion so hard wired it has become an extension of him.
The sounds grow louder. Some only suggestions of words.
He strains to hear. Is compelled to respond.
He must listen longer, for clarity.
Smoking now, the action natural and smooth.
Only urgent replies will do. Emphatic negatives.
He opens the window.
Pauses.
Shouts his responses to an audience of hedges and schoolchildren, careful to keep perfect his windowsill of objet d’art.
Hoarse from shouting.
Dopey from psychotropics.
Listing as though at sea.
Vision blurred by side effects, voices muted and muffled.
Respite comes through equine meditations as he sleeps lightly while standing.
Sleep is time measured in doing things.
Unbidden realities steal his thoughts and tell him so upon waking.
He drops to his sofa, body shaped cushions offering respite from harm.
Upon waking again, he is caught in a traction beam of unreality.
Pinballs of intrusion square the circle, offering him release in the successful union of contradictory things.