(I had just arrived back to Winnipeg from my first year of university at McGill in Montreal.  I saw myself falling into the same patterns of depression and self-medication that had characterized my last year of high school…Oh, and my “long distance relationship” broke up with me days after I returned home. )

She hasn’t slept for days.

This time I don’t really care.  I used to get so anxious about the sleepless periods I would subject myself to, swallow handfuls of sleepeaze tablets in an attempt to make things different.  That was back when I still got excited about things.  I think this parallel is more than a coincidence.

So it looks like I’m going to spend the summer ingesting about the same heinous quantity of chemicals as I did last year.  Yippee.  I truly don’t give a fuck anymore.  Sure, my blood still churns while I stand at a street corner, waiting for a dealer.  But that’s about it.  I used to be so amazed by the iradescent figures I’d see floating around the room after a few days such as these.  Maybe it’s time, maybe it’s some kind of getting used to, but such shapes are now nothing more than elavator music to me.

The come down is still a bitch.  The most twisted, heartless, soulless bitch I’ve ever known.  But in a sick way the come down is becoming my favourite part.  It’s the only time I really feel now.  The only time I cry for what should have been this summer.  The only time I remember how wonderful it was going to be.

So I don’t crave more right away, and certainly don’t believe I’m going to die if I don’t refuel like I used to.  I just sit still and wait for it to pass.  I feel the wetness of my tear-stained face and I feel almost whole.

Everything is so forced, even this.  Writing used to be my release, the one thing I could count on when all else had gone to shit.  I would sit at this same desk for hours pressing keys, and then read what had resulted again and again until I could breathe again.  Writing used to be my life support.

Mind you everything used to be a matter of life and death.  Can’t help but smile a little when I think about it.  Now both life and death seem so incredibly far away that they’re the last things on my mind.  I think I miss them both.  And I think this newfound distance has a lot to do with my lack of anxiousness, lack of excitedness, too.

I’m not pretending any of this is something it isn’t though.  I knew I was losing grip on the plane home from Florida, two months ago now.  Remembering it I’m tempted to change my mind, crown those three torturous hours as the bitchiest of all.  The pain was physical, and I think I wept for the full three hours although I’m sure my memory is exaggerating.

What little I feel, I feel much better now.  It’s being in limbo that I hate.  Now that my lonely status has been stamped and certified as legitimate, reasonable, now that I’ve been informed that I am, yes, once again alone, that pain is also growing distant.  And I have the freedom to seek satisfaction from all these other things now, things I forgot about.  Like how very lovely my father’s house is.  It looks like something out of a magazine, one of those interior decoration quarterlies I used to flip through when I was nine or ten.  Yes, once and a while, for about two seconds, the sheer size of this house, the way that all the furniture inside matches and still smells new after four years, leaves me unable to imagine what more I could possibly want.  Having nice things is nice.  Of course I’d prefer love any day, but having nice things is nice.

He read my stuff.  Spent the day before the apocalypse snooping through my personal writing, not bothering to mention this endeavour, leaving me to discover his fingerprints on my words now, when I am without the advantage of being able to pick up the phone and request an explanation.  I don’t know whether to be angry or laugh.  I know even less about who the anger or laughter would be directed at if I chose either.  So I won’t.  But I will wonder, every so often, if it was what he read that day that served as a last little push, served to convince him to do what he had been fantasizing about for months and ask that I leave.

I’ve always despised hopelessness, so embracing it is proving to be quite an experience.  “This can’t really be for good, can it?”  And for the first time it’s my voice saying, yes, yes it is.  Yes I’m sure.  The last time I looked in his eyes they were filled with that which means: This is the Last Time I’ll Ever See You.  I’m not kidding myself this time.  I think this might have something to do with why life and death have become so insignificant.

She stops typing for a minute to savour that wetness.

Yes, she really is sad.  Perhaps sadder than she’s ever been.

I have enough in my bag to get mashed again, but I’m not up for it.  Too lazy, too bored.  I think I’ll get drunk.  My dad’s liquor.  There’s no doubt I’ll get caught, but it doesn’t matter.  Getting caught in this house yields a question or two and a few disappointed glances, but that’s all.  Same thing I get when I do something good, substitute “disappointed” for “approving”.  Maybe I’ll laugh a little after all.  Everything is, really, quite funny.