Temporally Abating: The Little Pill Calvary
Photo by Chiron Duong
They tell us to kill our darlings.
Children cry in restaurants, they cry on planes, and they question why this shade of red is not the same as this shade of pink. In these scenarios it isn’t significant to reference their emotional state as causational to their outburst, for it can simply be a primal response to an extreme experience resulting in, by direct correlation, an extreme reaction. The child hasn’t experienced many restaurants, nor many planes in their short lifetime, and so the stimulus that is scratching at their brains starts to pierce the tissue and they can do nothing but exhibit terror. Wailing bloody murder seems to them the only feasible response to their stimuli and so they react fundamentally by instinct.
They reach for their mothers who have been distilled in complimentary pinot noir, they claw at a sense of security which has been tantalized by the dim lighting, by the shift in cabin air pressure. From the next aisle over, I watch in awe as I swallow a pill that will cancel out my equilibrium altogether, something those small children are so desperate to master, in hopes that it will revert my primal responses and sedate me. I only cry when I want to clear the lucidity.
The little pill’s goal, as it traverses my esophagus and finds land ahoy in my stomach lining, is to bridge the gap in between my neurons that recycle serotonin too quickly. I was explained this around the age of fifteen while sat on a black leather couch facing a beige wall, desperately avoiding the psychiatrist’s sterile gaze which, once finally met, revealed nothing other than the commonality between me and him: it was noon and we were both dying. Whether it was from existential dread or from the urge to go on a lunch break I am still uncertain, but when he spoke my brain produced a distant static, like I was recovering from a flash bang. Wading in fog, I stared at his computer without blinking during my diagnosis, shifting focus from one eye to the other in defiance. His screen had a reminder box flashing: Time to Stretch!
Stretching the temporal plane is what those little pills did to my brain. They were called to action when I experienced a primal reaction to an extreme situation, a literal shock to my neural system that shifted my equilibrium. As if, for instance, a figurative truck crashed into the retaining wall of my headspace. No, I seem to have those tenses wrong. It was a literal truck that crashed into the retaining wall of my headspace while I was sleeping in my room, triggering the figurative shock to my equilibrium, and so the little pill calvary was deployed. I was sent away from the needed repair, both physically to the integrity of the property and psychologically to the popped bubble wrap of my brain’s tranquility, and with some guidance from the University’s counseling department, I landed a three week stay at a hotel.
I was not the average hotel inhibitor. I watched Model-UN conference purveyors ask for popcorn at the front desk in the nighttime’s early hours, and I witnessed dealers of all sorts hide out in the corners of the lobby. I was spectating a world which I could only pass through, while the inhibitors of the hotel experienced a world which seemed to them semi-permanent: their own limiting infinity.
Careful watchers and light sleepers of the hotel ate breakfast in the morning, whereas city dwellers and movie lovers gathered their things to build a nest in their rooms towards the fall of evening. I was neither of these definitions, as I stole single-use cereal boxes in the daytime and locked my door at night. The “do-not-disturb” placard swung ambivalently from the door handle so that I could watch the moonlight flicker through the stark eucalyptus trees without disturbance. When the static of a near-mute television lulled me close to slumber, I would close my eyes and try to convert the sound of tires screeching into a warm faint breeze.
The little pill calvary took their effects shortly after my entering the hotel wing as a high roller. I wouldn’t have been able to operate a moving vehicle with the drugs in my system, but they worked hard at turning the volume down of all the extradiegetic noise in my skull. The more I took them, the more they reduced my extremes into mere middle-grounds, and I found them to be incredibly appealing. Time moved without my needing to control it, and I enjoyed floating when I walked. The more chemicals I pumped into my brain, the happier it seemed to make me, and yet this timelessness that it produced seemed to have an expiration date I had yet been made aware of.
What started as a way for my nerves to artificially calm themselves quickly shifted into a chemically induced lucidity, where all 600mg of little pill goodness stomped their way into my amygdala and quelled the natural born anxiety with an instinctual swallow of doubt. In an attempt to raise a white flag, I began massacring those troops in my brain incrementally, 100mg at a time, and my headspace within that titration morphed into an out-of-place liminal space. In wiping clean the additive chemicals, I wiped clean part of my thinking process, my critical analysis, and my identity.
Sedation became me. A cease fire of my own medical artifice has resulted in a cease fire of self actualization.
I began to be flushed of the extremes, placed into this defined intermittent middle, and yet those extremes were what derived much of my sense of self in the first place. I have known myself as a passionate exhibition of eclectic modes of thought, and when I decided to step off the train of sedation, an equilibrium that I needed at one point in time, those aspects of my personality slipped into limbic nothingness. I fell within the web of my lungs, and was flooded in the visceral sensation of being lost in a corn maze. The only light shining was the full moon overhead. My internal mind transformed itself into the interior of a Reno casino: temporally abating and lingering, cornered by the stench of stale cigarettes.
A blindness had replaced my once sharp sighted vision, and it had come at the cost of holistic collapse. For who am I without the core element of my identity: my mind? A phantom trapped in a picture frame, I seemed to imagine; a disposition that examines my cognitive coordinates as being nowhere, and yet still present; a type of existence that does not merit the value of exposure in its extremes, of feeling everything.
The little calvary did not protect me. They limited me, left me to linger in psychical limbo. I was subject to the modes of levitation that cascaded my acknowledgement of the world around me into a veil of white, melded into the black and white static of a television station no longer in use; of a reality that, if persistent, would limit me further. With the calvary still fighting a war that dissolved months ago, I was not able to produce the aversion of repression I so defiantly crave: manifesting dust floating around in my brain into tangible entities.
I want to be like those brave children who cry in restaurants, in parlors, and in classrooms because they are uncomfortable in its most extreme form. As I remove the influence of the little pill calvary, I have heard the time clock tick. It may be loud and domineering, but it is still a reminder that time is passing through me, rather than around me. The shrill will sound next to my ear, and I will revel in its licentiousness, until the tides pull back and the exposed rock reveals to me once more why babies cry when exposed to the cool, open air.