routine.

Over a twenty-four hour benchmark past now, that I've been unconscious. The clock ticked in its own incomprehensible pace; a pace I’d gotten used to. Waking up to a differently wired time of reality my body wasn’t too on par with…had I had too much to drink? Possibly. My head felt heavy and fixated on the bones I was sure I cracked rocking to the sermons at my funeral…funeral?

Involuntarily, my eyes hovered to the ticking clock, the sound so rhythmic like an unbearable drumming inside my ears. Make it stop. Please! Make it stop. This was routine, I consoled myself, and it truly was. Wake up in this confined space, a damn bright light somehow penetrating and making each senses of mine linked to vision prick like needles on fire. This was bloody routine.

I would then search my godforsaken, rusted and creaky drawer for some pill to keep me awake and somehow, God knows how, engage in my life of tedious monotony feeling stringed to an automaton hand controlling my being without a single speck of emotion; ergo caging any emotion I could have gathered to feel. I rummage through the open drawer, so rusted it no longer slides close. Skin on my palm, it can feel the sharp edges of the aluminum coated packaging of the pills. They were empty…why hadn’t I thrown them away?

Two strips of Clozapine lay before my eyes overlapping with the other as if mocking me for how their absence would make my coming hours miserable and test my endurance to its greatest heights. I blinked twice exactly before dangling my feet off the bed and slipped in my slippers that felt cold and unnaturally sharp. Skin or plastic, I could not say. Confused debates lingered in my head as my feet were dragged to the toilet. This was routine.

Half hour after, a striking flash would emit from the black screen of my phone and it would buzz in a provoking noise making my fingers ache to swipe the nuisance unlocked and delete the mind rattling service message asking me to spend on some outgoing call offer. Why could they just not understand? I had nobody to call.

I immediately deleted the message. That feeling of being watched the notification gave me, I so hated it. Staring at the blank screen after my scheduled chore for several seconds, I threw it off to the couch as it bounced back and onto the floor in a slam, then died as the cover flipped and the battery came off. The now fragmented cell in my vision made me come to the decision I’d look away to stop my eyes from hurting more than they already did.

Or so I thought. That morning my eyes didn’t pain as much as they should have. In fact, they didn’t pain at all. This worried me. To the point I was pondering despite my hatred of the chore, to ring the doctor up asking if some chemicals in my brains were acting up again.

On a reeking booze bottle my feet tripped as I struggled to make my way into the kitchen. The glass container, empty, rolled towards the counter, hitting its edge, pausing for a second, and rolled away at a different angle from me stopping midway seeming as though an unseen force kept it from reaching me, competing against me. It didn’t matter. This was routine. The rift between me and my inanimate possessions, err, companions, the clanking they made as I turned around, the screams of a sick and dead self, loud banging from behind my door I could hear as I left for work and my feet often disappearing from the sight below, my vision swaying in illusory waves: these were routine.

What day was it again? Did I have to go to work? There laid the calendar on the counter, but something forbade me to reach for it. I didn’t reason against it, yet at that moment, my body seemed to have a will of its own.

A Monday.

I had work to go to.

I twisted my ankle to turn around the stench-filled kitchen. It was pungent, chest gripping and horrendously disgusting of days long rotten flesh and decay. Of death.

And there was me.

Lying on the floor, so clearly not alive.

Eyes wide open in a disturbing grimace, mouth curled up and throat coloured in a straight line of dried blood. There was me. Lying on the floor. Absolutely dead. In my hands, a crumpled piece of paper that a chain of fear pulled me from seeing but curiosity overruled rationality.

This it said:

Dated: 27th April, 2000, Thursday.

Tonight, I do it. I slit the hands I see grabbing my neck. The bony clutch…I can’t take it anymore.

It was four days ago.