WITHDRAWAL

Forty-eight hours is all it took before the hallucinations began.

It started with cats...lots of cats. They haunt over my desk, saunter past by bed and often pay me a judging glance, heads tilted and with glowing green eyes, before leaping soundlessly off into the darkness and vanishing completely.

I don't own any cats.

It's okay. I know they're not real. For now, these apparitions of my mind are safe, almost amusing...but they won't stay that way and I am in more danger than I realize.

My mattress lies wedged like a sad life raft between my desk, filing cabinet and shelves. It was dragged into this room many years ago for very precise reasons – It is quiet, it is cool but mostly because it is mercifully dark. And that's what I require. Darkness...pure, enveloping darkness. This too has a precise reason.

Insomnia...true insomnia, is a terrible, erosive disorder. This is not the occasional bad night fixed by some melatonin and magnesium supplements. True insomnia is a pernicious and absolute inability to get to sleep under any circumstances no matter how exhausted you are. It is often treatment resistive and ignores even some of the strongest of medications. And this is...every...single...night.

This is what I have. And it is currently incurable.

Like having a disease without a cause, it has baffled my doctors, therapists and friends who all insist their cures work, which they never have. Not for me at least. That is until last year when I found a psychiatrist willing to do whatever it takes, to go where others wouldn't and to throw whatever pharmaceutical spaghetti at the wall to see what stuck for me. And we found one - a potent capsule imbued with the holy capacity to render me unconscious long enough to finally have a normal life. Because that's all I wanted – a normal life again. And I had it.

But it came with an extreme caveat – I can't stop taking it. Ever.

Benzodiazepines are a central nervous system depressant. They treat a number of problems - none of which I care about, because it does precisely what I need it to do. When you have a problem such as mine, you will throw anything at it to make it go away. But complying to this drug forces you into a chemical contract that you cannot break. A marriage you cannot leave. Once committed, it is a compelled nightly consummation, whose relief is beautifully promised and satisfying, but if this alchemical lover were to leave you, your spiraling descent is absolutely guaranteed. For it is a dependency. Total dependency. That's the agreement.

And I've now run out.

How is not important. A confusion at the pharmacy and the prescription sent across the country to a different store. Not transferable, not my fault and not my rules. An emergency email is sent to my doctor but it is now the weekend and the solution I need is not coming any time soon. All I know is that my studio is filled with imaginary cats and I am on the onset of withdrawal.

It will get worse. Believe you me...

The bearded man then appears - snake eyes and sitting there smoking in my studio chair glaring at me. He looks familiar but I can't place him. “We don't really smoke in here,” I say, “but since you don't really exist I guess it's okay.” Was that rude to say, I think? How does one politely talk to a hallucination? I can smell the smoke. How does that work? Then violently, his eyes flare white and he lurches forward, angrily flicking the cigarette past me in a a burning arc to vanish somewhere behind my mattress. I turn and desperately claw around in the dark searching for it. I feel foolish. It doesn't exist but I have to be sure, right? One has to be absolutely sure of something like that. Though he has vanished and replaced with a chair I don't even own, I can still smell the smoke. I can't find the imaginary cigarette. My breathing is heavy and ragged and it is the first time I feel afraid.

This is how it's going to go isn't it? There is no map for this, no predictor of how bad it's going to be.

Sour clutch now in my stomach like a muscular fist. I'm going to puke. The sheets, sweat-stained, shred about me like a chaos of some mad eddy pool. The red clock has a 5 in it but I can't read it now. I have to find the basket but it's in the next room. Everything is black save the wall I see floating to my side. It should have the light switch on it. It's just next to the door. Where is it? I get to a hulking half stand and reach out for it but my hand passes through the hallucinogenic wall into blackness, into blank space and I hurtle forward, knees hitting the floor. I tilt sideways into something sharp. Righting myself, I crawl, grasping into what should be a room so familiar but is now alien, scattered and incoherent. My stomach seizes again. Not much time now. The inevitable has started. Panic now. Where's the waste basket? My hand brushes against something solid, something plastic.

The vomiting starts in shallow fits. A shallow gasping that would be a sound unmistakable from dying. Clean streams of some liquid burst forth into the darkness hitting something soft. Another and another and I don't know where it comes from because I have not eaten in days. Then comes the pause. I know this pause. You think you're done but you're not. Then the final purging, the last clutch of the fist in fierce diminishing pulses – and then it's over. You always know when it's really over. Like some dark orgasm.

Turns out I vomited into my suitcase filled with clothes I haven't yet unpacked. Can't deal with that now. That is for later. A later that has no date, no end point. All I have is now and that now is an impending terror I can't control.

It is about this period that I begin to lose time. Days will erase themselves behind me as if they never existed. Like some liminal palimpsest leaving no trace of memory, and in the darkness what is day or night lose their visual boundaries. A blurred glance at the clock says 3:14 but that means nothing anymore. AM is no different than PM because there is no day or night anymore.

The hallucinations become indistinguishable from dreams now, because insomnia dreams are not dreams at all really, but splintered fragments of dreams that broke off in my mind. They are the incessant dip-wake dip-wake of sleep that is not sleep. They are the fleeting, subconscious blinking into a catalog of random memory, like opening a dark, crammed closet tossed with the cluttered leavings of my past, like unpaired shoes or photos torn in half. All familiar. None complete. Yet each scene floats towards my eyes demanding a witness. Yes, to be witnessed again. These dreams that are not dreams. The demons of withdrawal.

And in the dream that is not a dream I see my father is dying again. This is no longer imaginary cats or bearded men with angry cigarettes. I see the hospital gurney with the clean sheets and the cats staring up from his knurled feet to his paling face. Skin like bleached paper stretched taut over bone, his toothless mouth agape in a howl that has no sound for he can no longer form words. Words are the last to go. But in this dream that is not a dream I can hear in my head him calling me, a moaning paean with the sound of my name while the piff-PUFF piff-PUFF of the oxygen machine breathing relentlessly and out of sight - A metronome of impending death timed with the math of coerced bbreaths per minute. Its sound is incessant and haunts the air and has only a singular and inevitable implication – it will someday stop. And it will only stop when he will stop.

But I am not awake nor I am asleep, yet my father is still dying in my eyes and the sound pulses...till it stops. I hear the soft click of the off button beneath my hesitant finger. I am not awake nor am I asleep. I cannot shut this off. Then I see Frank. Yes, Frank is his name. The funeral director. “Please, Frank cremate him in his Disney shirt.,” I plead. “I promise, Kevin.” Mom is in a crumple in maroon sweat pants upon the couch. Last looks. Wheeled out, ghosted under a white sheet. Goodbye, Dad. Then the dull sound of trunk doors shutting out in the street. Engines starting, pulling away in a trail and then silence.

My father died seven years ago. I am not awake nor asleep.

The red ash spirals in the air again but there are no more cats. Stomach, sick sallow green once more. I suddenly need someplace else. Someplace...solid. Something with a boundary and not the open twisted sheets splayed about me in a chaos. I slow lurch to my feet, hand tracing rough against a wall, then another. Staggering out through open space and then an open door - the light of pale dawn to my left slurs from windows high upon the shadowed walls of the studio beyond my darkened room. This is not a dream. This is my home. I wheel caterwaul past soft furniture, a blur of shapes, my hands out in a falter of uneven steps. One more door to get through. Down a short hall, turn left then safety. A gentle collapse and I am now in that someplace. That someplace solid, safe and strangely cool. I am carrying a blanket.

Now resting, a careen of faces appear. A cascade of names taken by death, their faces floating like icons in an arched ceiling in a cathedral of loss. Why this now? So many. Then blackness as I curl into myself. And finally silence.

*

“Kevin? Kevin!” The voice is familiar. Soft. Someone close, someone safe. I stir in a confusion not knowing where I am. “Are you okay?” she asks desperately. Oh...Christine, It's Christine.

“I don't know,” I say. My voice is barely a whispered choke. “Where...I don't know where I'm...”

“Your Mom called me. She's scared, Kevin. She thought you were dead. I mean it. You haven't called her in days. Are you okay? What's going on?!”

Mom...Oh right Mom. When was the last time I talked to her? I don't remember. I begin to stir, feel around myself. It's white. Sort of white.

I'm in my bathtub. What am I doing in my bathtub?

“Are these yours? Are these them?!” she asks. “I found them. They were under your stairs outside.”

She's clutching a bottle of pills. She holds them out to me like a Eucharist. They're blue and white. Under the stairs? I look at the label.

It's my medication.

What?! Seriously, what? How is this even possible? By what divine fiat could this have happened?

What I did not know, and what ensued in the days before my senses eroded, was that my doctor had actually got my prescription called in. And not only that...I had actually picked it up. Roommates who saw my plight as I sat blighted out on our porch had driven me in desperation to the pharmacy. Yes, I had actually picked my prescription up and then, stumbling back through my front door, unconscionably dropped it to the ground – and then entirely forgot about it. For four days. That's how far gone I was.

When I hadn't called my mother in all this time, she thought I was dead - as all mothers think and especially mine. So she called in what was essentially was an air strike. That air strike was her calling my best friend for a wellness check. She found me in a tub clutching a blanket.

Medication now in hand, I was back to normal within twenty-four hours. Just one 15 mg white and blue pill and a glass of water. It was that sadly simple. That fragile. And I never noticed the email from my doctor exclaiming, “GO TO THE EMERGENCY ROOM. NOW!” It was from three days before. I could have had a seizure. Or worse.

Life with disorders is a balancing act. No one asks for them. We do our best and in the precarious balance sometimes our angels work overtime – those both seen and unseen. So we get to live again.