Blind Window

Another strange day. Catie is at her mothers and so there's no reason to get off the couch and many pressing reasons not to. The cats have come to regard me as furniture and unselfconciously run along me or sit on me as they rush about their busy lives. Jake is happily curled up on his bed by my side, occasionally he checks I'm still breathing or asks out by probing my face with a dark, wet nose and an expressive snort that is as individually his as any turn of phrase or linguistic tic. It was dark, then light, now dark again. A day has passed. Time flows past us furniture in confusing eddies and swirls; an age crept past inside the oubliette of my skull, filled with thought moving at tectonic speeds, I drifted from one idea to another through a spider web of association until I could no longer see the pattern and wondered how I'd got from there to here. Memories crept out of old trunks that I thought I'd padlocked long ago and replayed their horrors and regrets but outside my skull the shadows had not moved and the clock had only ticked away 10 minutes.

Another week of drug withdrawal to go and then a day or so when I'll be all alone with the chemistry of my brain before the merciful plunge into my new mental anaesthetic.