Sobriety Turns Me On

The humdrum, simple moments of life are what I want so badly I can taste it.  I fantasize about it.  I have dreams flushed with the radiance of life’s simple pleasures, the everyday trials and rewards that routine brings.  I also have exasperating dreams where I use copiously and can’t get high, and mind-blowingly satisfying dreams where I use and it feels sooo good, like it did the first time.    

I wake up every morning with the hope that my high today will be better than it was yesterday, that maybe it will feel good again.  The ecstasy of using disappeared a while ago.  For the most part, all it does now is help me maintain and keep feelings of sickness at bay.  My greatest wish is to wake up, go to a dull job, come home, eat dinner, spend a few hours in the evening winding down, and repeat it the next day.  I would find so much satisfaction in that.  I fear losing everything, including drugs, which are my final and failsafe lifeline.  I am fucking up so badly with my obligations at work and home that I anticipate encountering something drastic every time I step outside my door.  Even so, drugs create this invisible shield that buffers me from all of it.  It’s a mental partition that keeps me from being too concerned over the reality of my situation, which is that I’m hanging on by less than a thread.  My goal is to make people think I’m hanging on by at least a thread, but that veneer is beginning to wear extremely thin.  Every day I screw up and blow things for myself and people around me, and I think, tomorrow; I’ll get it right tomorrow.  Every night I go to bed with the best of intentions to get up at 5AM, crank out a week’s worth of work by 9AM, another week’s worth by noon, tend to everything I’ve been neglecting for months, and achieve some damage control by patching up a bit of the harm I’ve caused.  Realistically, I usually stay up using until 5AM, but this thought process carries over from Monday to Tuesday, then to Wednesday and so on, until another Friday has come and gone.  Then I think, I’ll catch up this weekend.  I anticipate each weekend as a chance to make up some extra credit points.  It never happens.  Pretty soon weeks start bleeding into each other, then months, and it starts to sink in that I’ve lost control.  Still, every morning I wake up hoping that today will be a better day than yesterday, and that I can make things up a little to the people in my life.

I used to have this fantasy as a kid that I could freeze time and still move around in the world.  For instance, I would freeze time and spend a week doing whatever the hell I wanted, and I could clean my room too.  When time started up again, my room would be clean and I wouldn’t be in trouble anymore.  I wish I could do that now, and just take some time to myself to rest and recharge.  I would keep time frozen as long as it takes to finally get a restful sleep and wake up feeling refreshed and restored.  I wish I could actually ask people for an opportunity like that, to just take a week to rest.  I hit a wall a long time ago, and I just need to back up for a short while and catch my breath.  I can’t bring myself to talk about it with anyone though.