Synthetic Heaven

“The spiritual journey is not about heaven.” 
—Pema Chödrön

Flit 

And now it is summer. The sun coming into the room hot, the sheets on the line starting to billow in the warm wind. And the moment my hand is about to touch the pill. The palm the heat the crushed white powder sprinkled over a blunt. I am waking up. I awake on my back, on my friend’s couch, in the city. The sun pouring in through the slats of the blinds. My eyes flitting at the ceiling, my limbs aching in pain. Trying to calm down. But the moment my throat finds the word for what I need, the pill the powder the drug is already gone. Swallowed, metabolized. And already I am awaking again, sweating again, yelling again. I awake to the wide blue sky. The hottest day of summer, sun all around. I shove my hands under my armpits to try and stop the shaking. It is the past inside of me, roaring again. And what does it say? And I was alive. And I was human. And I was in pain. And I was every animal that wanted a way out. I awake to the worst day of summer. The one where I say, “okay this is the last time,” and more than oxy and percocet and crushed white powder over weed, the speediest of speed balls, I said, “I just need one last pill and then I’m going to give it all up.” Sweating in the ruthless furnace of the world. I just need a little relief. To be gone, for a bit. The glare of the sun prickling my eyes. I swallow the pill the powder the syrup and my body is speeding away. Only to awake again. To bump up against the hard lip of reality, again. In agony, again. I realize when I awake to the wide ochre sky bleeding rust into deep blue. How could I be gone? I was never truly here. 

“To Give / the Body What It Knows / It Cannot Keep” 

The first time I take a benzodiazepine is in the summer I am seventeen. It is the afternoon and a dream is coming. A man is in my house, a man is coming toward me, my frantic shadow, which was much smaller then, flits long on the concrete. This is the moment everything I know will fall apart and end, can go no further, but also the moment everything I am scared of will begin, again.Something happened a long time ago. Something is happening still. I watch him enter the apartment and begin to grasp, as if in slow-motion, what is about to happen to me, but just like now, just like then, I can’t stop him. The nightmare is so upsetting I am hitting myself when I awake, afternoon light prickling my eyes open, bruises are beginning to bloom along my legs. I awake to the loud silence of a chest, my own, I realize, heaving. 

Afterward, I leave my house in a daze. I find myself, that afternoon, carried to an emergency department in Camperdown. I talk to a psychiatrist. She hands me an amber bottle filled with a few off-white pills. “Valium,” she says, touching my shoulder not untenderly.

I walk home that night and the bottle rattles like thunder in the pocket of my shorts. 

When I arrive home, I can’t bring myself to go inside. I walk straight out into the night, into the backyard, and without thinking I take out a cigarette. A single light from the porch spills into the backyard as I stand there smoking. I walk right up to the back fence, and stand amongst the ferns and shrubbery, which is the furthest and darkest spot away from my house. One hand holding my cigarette while the other hand takes out the amber bottle. I shake the bottle a little. Rattle, rattle. I imagine my ma talking to me, in a low hushed voice, telling me—like she did all those years ago in this backyard—about what happened and how she was, “Sorry.” And surrounded by the tropical air, which in a place like Sydney in the summer is humid even at night, I want to cry. 

But instead, I take a pill and swallow. And the edges of the night, the world, my vision, my memory goes mercifully—soft. 

Synthetic Heaven 

Years later, in an AA meeting, I would hear a disheveled man with his hands shoved deep into his pockets, his eyes staring at the ground, say dreamily, “Well, you know, it’s like a synthetic heaven.” And I would think, God, he’s right. And when the high would hit, I would think to myself—This. This for as long as I can. More than summer and bicycles and flowers littered on the pavement like confetti, more than the way Sydney looks in the spring, especially at night, the moon backlighting the exploding crabapple trees, the flowers perfuming the night air—more than ocean pools and films and even the way the purpling sky in Marrickville looks at twilight when I would walk home after seeing the married woman I loved beyond all hope or reason. It is the relief of the crushed white powder. Synthetic heaven. 

The man in AA would wear a jumper with a hole in it and he would look like he hadn’t shaved in days and when he would finally look up, to face the room, I would see it. His eyes dreamy with sleep, in a cloudy trance, under a hazy scrim. The room might as well have been enveloped in smoke. He would sit down in his chair, languid. And I would think, although I would have been in AA for many years by that point, although I should have known better by that point, and said it’s closer to a synthetic hell than a heaven—I would still think, God I want to feel that easy in the world. 

Interiors 

This is how the evening unfolds: There is a dark blue valley somewhere across the country, and in that valley, tiny specks of houses. Windows of yellow light dotting the land. Inside one of these houses, I go to bed clutching an amber bottle. And after I swallow, which is always warm and steady and feels like drawling around vowels, beads of relaxation form within me. And although I am often lying on my bed exhausted, still in the clothes that I wore to work or university, and nightmares encroach like shadows, slowly there is a soft laugh. And the corners of my mouth droop down into a smile. 

The cool feeling of the plush doona. A weight that sinks as I lie down. Moonlight treading on the white sheets. Soft plush pillows. Pale blue sheets. A warm yellow lamp in the corner of the room. An open window, which I lie under. The sound of the night outside. A kind of hush over the city. 

And I can’t hear the click of a latch being undone anymore, the sound of shoes hitting the pavement frantically, the whine of a siren in the distance, a police car tearing through the cold dark city. All of it is turned down low, and then muted. I can only lie there and pull the bedsheet over my head. And the sheet isn’t a sheet anymore but the sky and the lamp isn’t a lamp anymore but the sun. And finally, I can sleep.

Every Animal (I) 

That summer, I start attending a clinic at a hospital for group therapy. A woman, an in-patient at the clinic, complains to me on the first night about the hospital soap and the way it is drying out her skin. She shows me the small disc of angry red scales which has formed on her hand. She always had psoriasis, she explains, but now it flares on her hands, at the crook of her knees, her elbows, even her scalp. She scratches her head and exhales irritably. 

I am at the hospital three nights a week. Those nights become all harsh fluorescent lighting. Hard white tiles with the sharp unpleasant smell of disinfectant. Cold cafeteria meals, sandwiches. Occasionally, I buy a chocolate bar from a vending machine and take it back to the clinic to share with the other patients, some of whom have become my friends. Once, during a session, a woman describes how a parent punched her in the face when she was young and broke her nose. She points to her nose and the hairline fracture, I have to turn away, unable to look. 

All night long but especially during the interminable hours after group therapy, when I am alone in the house again, I feel the weight of the amber bottle in my pocket. I lie on my bed and swallow. And swallow again. And then I am, for the briefest of moments, even when I am in the house, no longer in the house. I am running on a beach, I am watching shadows flit on the sand, I am trying to catch the off-white light pooling in the back of my throat, drip-feeding me relief. 

Every Animal (II) 

All that summer, after I leave group therapy, I walk past the hospital ward. I often see a woman, through a window, lying in bed. She looks terrible. Graying hair, cracked lips. The woman seems confused and writhes around, like she is drifting in and out of consciousness. Occasionally, the woman wakes up and is agitated, scratching at the wires on her chest. Other times, the woman lies very still, as something drips from an IV bag next to her bed. Sometimes I watch as the woman, with her eyes still closed, presses the IV button in her hands, and then presses it again. 

One night, I walk past the woman’s room after group therapy and I see her body, which seems small and bird-like, asleep in the hospital bed. And then I think to myself, no. That’s not right. She doesn’t look bird-like. She looks human. Like her body and mind are trying to find a way out. To be ok, even now.

Komorebi Prose 

Years later, I would try to get sober. And walking up a street in Surry Hills in spring I would turn my head upward and notice, as if for the first time, sunlight filtering through the leaves of a tree. And I would feel not happy. It would not be that easy. I would still be collapsing from body aches and not be able to keep food down. And I would still be puking from withdrawal or stress or the belief that I wouldn’t be able to live without something for relief. It would not be that easy, no. But a small sense of astonishment would, suddenly, return. At the scattered light, streaming through the trees. The light and leaves moving like a blur of small wrens taking flight. A startlement. In the clear break of day, washed afresh, waking from the scrim. And feeling excruciating pain, feeling a fear that unfurled on the edges of an engulfing darkness, but also feeling alive. As Michael W. Clune writes in White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin, “I remember … re-experiencing the taste of food, the pleasure of walking outside and being in nature … For an addict, those come as a revelation.” And for a moment, on that street in spring, body tilting upward toward the trees and the sky, I would think to myself, I could do it. I could give up the crushed white powder, the dosage of relief, the technicolor simulacrum of heaven which was revealed, after all, to be just a simulacrum. And to just experience ordinary life, for a time, as enough. From an interview with Maggie Nelson in The Paris Review about her addiction to alcohol: “The thing is, quitting has to come … from a true exhaustion and an interest in what else there might be.” 

Dream Withdrawal 

But then—a psychiatrist, one who worked in the same hospital where the medication was first prescribed, would say to me, “It’s not easy to come off benzodiazepines. People can suffer from withdrawal symptoms worse than heroin or ice.” 

A psychatrist would read the withdrawal symptoms off a clipboard to me: “…delusions, hallucinations, psychosis, seizures, suicidal ideations, heart palpitations, nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea, anxiety, insomnia…” 

And I wouldn’t know what to say to the psychiatrist, because she was wrong. Withdrawal is hard. But not just because you have to withdraw from a drug. It’s because you have to withdraw from a dream. A dream that there is something in the world—against nightmares, against intrusions, against loneliness, against the howl that sounds through the body when it is in pain—that will make you feel better. A dream of rescue. 

The psychiatrist would read off a clipboard, “Medication side effects, or adverse benzodiazepine tapering reactions, range from mild to severe/life threatening.” And I would want to respond, Yes, but relief from pain. Yes, but meets the human desire to be okay.

Addiction as Memory Disease 

frantic i am trying to catch the pill the powder the syrup flecked with gold tones. i start university but pills spill out of an amber bottle a doctor gave me. there are blanks. did i read         or        last week?  a photograph was taken with            on the lawns but the photo is already dissolving. wait              wait i’m trying to remember how it felt to sleep          beside a woman i met late at night. her name was            and i thought she could save me but then we           and I never saw her again. my ma disclosed she was           and that’s why she wasn’t home that day. and I told her I wouldn’t forget but I wanted to forget. the pill promised as the colours in the room were dissipating even more colour. but I open my mouth now. dark and cavernous and once more           catastrophically          empty.

Just Say No 

It is the past inside of me, roaring again. And what does it say? Rattle like I needed every pill I ever took. Rattle like there is terror in this world. Rattle like when I thought crushed white powder from an amber bottle, rattling light from the off-white moon trapped flickering inside, could save me. Rattle like I didn’t even know that this is what surviving was. To rattle a bottle all night long. While in the dark, a cigarette flares and fades. Too quickly. Rattle like sometimes I wanted to escape the world. But rattle sometimes I wanted more of the world. More comfort, more color, more heat. Rattle if one feels good rattle then why isn’t more better? Rattle like could you forgive the rattling? When I was on the floor all that summer, begging. Becoming every rattle—desperate and hollow—that rattled human through the night?

Author’s Notes

The subtitle “To Give / the Body What It Knows / It Cannot Keep” is borrowed from Ocean Vuong’s poem “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.” The line is, “for hunger is to give / the body what it knows / it cannot keep.”

“Komorebi Prose” references an excerpt from Michael Clune’s White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin.

“Komorebi Prose” also references an excerpt from “The Art of Nonfiction, No.13” interview from the Paris Review, which features Maggie Nelson.