How To Remember

Insomnia has always wrapped its icy fingers around my limbs and tugged at me, one way, then another, ever since I can recall the need for sleep. It is like breathing, or eating, to me. It is commonplace. I am trapped in a web delicately touched with morning dew, my eyes rimmed with black, sunken, every morning because I am literally devoured whole by my past in my dreams. After closing my eyes, I sometimes find myself back in a tiny flat over a chocolate and pastry shop, living with my older boyfriend, tripping at three in the afternoon on laced LSD and wondering exactly where I placed my hairbrush.

With incredible clarity I recall macaroni and cheese turning to maggots (and they say the hallucinations only manifest if you believe they will, but I didn't see that on my horizon, it just happened and caught me completely off guard) and the airplane which skimmed the sky in a loop, repeating, coming back around for more and more until an hour had passed and I had been staring in to a mirror, losing myself. Whether or not there was an airplane is debatable.

I remember one such drug interaction where I walked the forty minutes to the hospital because I just could not come down. Somehow I had convinced my friend that she, too, was going to die, and begged her to come with me. There is nothing you can do about LSD. You wait. You sit and wait and you pull on your hair and listen as it squirms out of your scalp. You contemplate it critically and you never, ever turn on the television. You don't eat or drink, you just hold on, hold on…

I arrived at the hospital at 6:40 or so in the morning; thirteen, destitute, scared out of my mind. My companion had complained of seeing animals the entire way, but she was just as disturbingly intoxicated as I was, and I tried not to listen to her. I had my own problems, hearing children calling my name from a distance though I knew there was nobody there, yet I still spun around mindlessly a few times, searching, seeking.

They admitted me to a white room, possibly the worst course of action in the history of drug related admissions. For those of you reading who have never ingested a hallucinatory drug, white walls are quite like the Devil. They twist, turn, and pull you in to them, they are a spotless conduit for creating something out of nothing. I used to avoid paper, mirrors, walls and the sky when I was high; I could not imagine why the doctors thought this was a proper method for containing what was clearly about to become a national problem: Me.

I closed my eyes and traced angels with lights behind the lids, sobbing silently. I had given a fake name, told them I was on acid and needed desperately to be monitored. I explained that I was an eighteen year old drop out, jobless, no social insurance number, and new to town - I hoped they would just take me at face value instead of pressing, I wasn't in a state to deal with somebody I didn't know probing me while I was watching their face dissolve in to nothing. They had brought me toast (dry) and orange juice (somewhere along the line I had read that citric acid was good for coming down off of an LSD high. Once I ate an entire orange while still in the checkout line at the grocery store in an attempt to restore sanity and merely gagged, without any positive side effects) and a telephone that they stated I certainly could dial out on if I pressed 7, surely somebody would come and look after me. I remember I had laughed, which prompted my friend in the next room to laugh, and we made noises back and forth between our cubicles until I had decided it was better to be silent with my eyes squeezed shut, then to be making nonsensical noises in the sterile hospital I didn't feel I belonged in.

I contemplated that telephone for three hours while lights on monitors flashed, and we were essentially left to our own devices in our separate rooms. My toast smelled stale,  and realizing that I could smell it brought me down to Earth a little bit…my juice was drained the moment it got here; I still clung to the idea that it would magically cure me of my self induced curse. My mouth was dry and I wanted water, but I didn't think it would be good to bother the nurses and doctors who had others to tend to, others who were physically injured or sick, while I was merely here on my own accord because I didn't think I could handle reality, or was it that I couldn't handle the imaginary? I didn't know any more.

At the four hour mark I picked up the phone. I dialed my Grandmother, who I hadn't seen in three weeks, and in a pitifully thin voice I asked her if she could come and pick me up, please, because I had admitted myself with a terrible migraine…

These little lies consume me, to this day. They keep me awake, heart pounding, waiting to be caught. I touch thirty one, can see it if I splay my fingers on a clean window and peer through them, fogging the glass with my breath, and yet...I am still desperately afraid of being found out. Those little lies were a lot easier when I was only hurting myself.