Waking Nightmare

Momentarily, I'm stranded on the sand, gulping for air.

The basket of drugs fell out of my hands, muffled as it crashed by the carpet in the pharmacy. My head jutted upwards, eyes opening widely--I had nodded out again. I bent down to pick up the bottles of medication, placing them back into the black basket.

Embarrassment could have flushed my cheeks, but I was too overcome by the stream of morphine from last night and this morning, plus the xanax as well, flooding my body. My emotions were absent, my mind far from the current situation--I can't remember any thoughts, fear.

My pharmacist was far too busy trying to control the mess in front of her; she's constantly overwhelmed by her own incompetency. L was at the register, in an area separated from the back of the pharmacy by a wall. I was on my own.

I finished putting every bottle carefully back up on the shelf and returned to the computer to type up prescriptions.

Again, I felt my neck snap forward and rattle me awake.

I was running out of control--and no one knew it. The customers weren't flooding in front of me, so I quickly ran to the back. Telling my coworkers I had to take my meds, as I quickly departed. I popped the top off my adderall bottle, and tossed it in the back of my throat with some water. If I had been more present, I would've thanked whoever created those tiny little gel caps for saving my ass.

Now the fear had started to set in, hard and fast, running down my spine and across my face. Back in the pharmacy, I made sure to keep awake and upright. I imagined I could only fall asleep twice standing up before someone noticed--not that anyone I worked with would've put the two together. At least, I don't think so--although my prescribed medications are known to my coworkers, so easy enough to chock it up to them and lack of sleep.

Hours later, I am ready to bang my head into the wall, so frustrated and out of control with no where to send these emotions. The kratom and morphine and 1 oxy, plus some xanax, is not helping me cope with myself and the knot in my stomach is growing unruly.

I just keep spinning out further each day and I don't know what I'll hit before I stop.

Barbaric Thoughts

The front of my head screams for more, and yet there is nothing to feed it. Morphine might as well be a fucking aspirin--it has no high. It contains nothing.

I'm splayed on the bed, watching the fan spin above me spin in a blur, listening to the newest album by The Libertines (Anthems for Doomed Youth). Time ticks by waiting for the krater to set in--a crap replacement for oxycodone, when 20mg of oxy won't even get me high. At least I'm trying, that's what they always said was the important part.

Like the fan, I'm spiraling out of control with anxiety and pills. I'm far too close to being out with at least 2 weeks before I can even fill a new prescription. Living in the pharmacy, I factor in the number of days in a month, the rules of how soon I can fill, and how the doc will write my script this time--my script, my ticket out of this hell hole of a mind.

I'm far too close to cracking in 2, or 5, or dissolving into a puddle of pure excrement. Back to the old punk ways of showering barely twice a week (not a good look in public). Maybe I can just blame it on my old ways starting to break back in.

I lay my arms out across the bed and close my eyes, as if to summon the days of my youth when I would save those precious few oxys I'd thieved for the end of the week. On Friday nights, as Trainspotting or the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson played in the distance of my darkened bedroom. My arms across my chest, ready for the grave, nodding in and out of those strange dreams. Sometimes, I'm amazed at my self control to save those pills for the end of the week, when now I can't keep myself from my fingers reaching back into the bottle for double the pills I'm prescribed.

40mg of oxycocdone/apap and 30mg of morphine er a day should suffice for one human being, but there's no way to stop myself from crawling back into that amber vial. I hand them off to R to hold for me, but he's far too nice to stop me when I request another, and another. He can't help it, he loves me, wants me happy. And sometimes, I equate happiness with being high. Depression has swept back over me like the waves on Long Beach Island, where the Atlantic would come crashing down on my head once more--suddenly gulping sea water and tumbling in the surf.

Drugs surround my every waking moment, from work to home to sleep, dreaming of aisles, shelves full of medicine for those broken minds, bodies, and bones.