despondent mountain

In 2013, according to this packaging, Sanofi Pharmaceuticals in Guildford, Surrey manufactured and bottled a promethazine solution. Surely, they bottled others, but we are not interested in their lineages - no, we are gathered here, today, to discuss the one bottle that was before me one recent evening, one that I would consume by chance, that made it’s way from a well known chemist (initially bought for my younger brother’s flight trip.) One month later in my darkened room lit only by a computer monitor, after a long week and barely any sleep, I choose to finish the remainder of the already half used bottle. In less than one hour the effects fully took hold of my body. The orange fermented sleep potion which had been for nearly a year was exorcised and mixed into a glass of herbal tea, briefly, where it swirled as a miniature hurricane - and then was emptied into my mouth, down my esophagus, until it reached and settled in my stomach, before being softly rippled by the faint beat of my sedated heart. At this point I was on my bed already, a heavy head pushed backwards onto the pillow by this earth’s unflinching pull.

And I saw a mountain, or parts of mountains, their far horizons collated into one view. A place to climb towards, like some unhappy monk who had this idea of “happy” in his mind, if only he could walk far enough, to foot-blister prove himself to God or something. But the mind, as mine goes, is not a happy place, but a vessel of daily wounds slowly aggregated over two and half decades into a tumor of pudgy sighs. And so, there on my Ikea leather black bed, I stared at the ceiling - or more accurately, the ceiling eclipsed my view into nothingness. Still thinking about the Chinese Sumi ink mountains I saw on an art blog earlier that day, I wanted to be there, to have that view, to purge my mind off the ledge, and forget the things that happen to a person, those small meaningless things which yet causes a person to not want to wake up in the morning and not want to go to sleep at night.

And in between this morning and night there is day, a sieve of time and light through which I, we, are barely not falling. If there is such a thing as an honest prayer - detached from want, need, confusion, and fear - then I want to say it, not with my mouth or heart, or any other cliched body part, but with my bladder, the last thing in this depleted man that is not empty. I believe to be what the kids today refer to as “faded” on my bed, the internet and/or tv going puff puff in the background, each light bulb in my house fighting off the universe’s eternal night. I wake from the best sleep in years, waking from another year, into another place, another world. This one has no mountains, and no prayer, just some Sudanese guy walking towards something, looking at his feet, wondering how the other one knows when to move next.