A Ceaseless Yearning For Amantadine on Dining Tables
By Anindya Arif
I love that deafening hour at any party, where everyone’s eyes are akin to driving
away to a familiar place that only holds the nostalgia of what was. You can tell from
the shape of their voices they are all stuck in a pain they cannot get away from. The moment's stillness breaks as I remember how far gone and transient all my memories have become. A passing afternoon in 2005, I spent writing a dissertation on the stochastic nature of life in a fuchsia-coloured tavern. Years spent on amantadine watching my parents’ cherry wood dining table eroding.
My favourites lately are the days that barely register or the ones I spend in a medicated haze, smoking cigarettes and discrediting the Barnum effect. Last week//or, three Sundays before, I honestly cannot recall or be bothered to, I spray painted on a subway’s platform walls “how you do not have to psychoanalyse every moment, every conversation, every little thing anyone does in a clueless attempt to sweep away the very magic that gives them life". Unsurprisingly, I felt dizzy while debating whether to take Zyprexa or Majoven XL. While highlighting all the takes I disagreed with in this month's Atlantic; I ended up taking them both.
On the nights I cannot sleep, I list out the best ways of dying from hypothermia before giving up midway through and starting over again every single time. All the porcelain and velvet in my room constantly remind me of the joys I have felt, leaving me nauseous. Perhaps without these privileges, my psychosis would be magnified, leading to a barrel of meandering suffering. To keep track of my days, I have started to gash the walls of every place I have been with my Victorinox.
As Michael Davis plays out the last bit of Flamenco Sketches, all the circles I made converge to a Mountain Dew commercial. I have to inventory everything I have in my fridge, and I am taking longer pauses. The fact that I have not gone to the movies any later than 12:25 and all I feel is panic means it is October now.
October skies have always romanticised the trivial atrocities of modern life. Like only listening to radio stations that play music your exes liked, or how you should have your aviators on when the plastic surgeon replaces your bones with tinted glass. This makes it the most pristine time to ask random passersby what is so ugly about the colour yellow, or if I sleep long enough, would I wake up as someone new? I barely recall their responses except how a tenant below me kept repeating I was there and that this mattered to me. But nothing matters, right? It all leads up to a big nothing.
The dwindling spring drags on, causing new cracks in my satin armour, making me more shallow and conformist. I have started to experiment by mixing Epilim and Invega with Clozaril, which coincides with the entire room being filled wiceaseless white noise. In another medicated haze, I paint a picture of my mother giving me lilacs. I cannot say with a hundred per cent certainty that it is my mother in the image. However, it does provoke her, not necessarily in a matter-of-fact sense that it gets all her features right, but rather, how it makes up for her absence. Still, I like the idea of it being her (I lied).
The white noise soon gets drowned out by the noise from the ambient television, where a man screams about how he feels alienated by her behaviour and cannot figure out what she's trying to tell him. When all the screaming from the television fails to provide me with any catharsis, I switch to a phone-in show where the experts anatomise why people on Zyprexa or Epilim keep holding on to loss, just to affirm their belief that being on their own is better than to be bound to people were meant to love them but could not.
There is a new crevice in the wall, which makes me afraid; my phone used to have a comfort number, but the nostalgia attached to it makes me feel foreign now. Instead, I look for a theory I read when I was seventeen on how repeatedly calling back on memories alters the core experience as the differences pile up. It drives away what made the memory so special to begin with. The theory offers me no amnesty, as I can barely call back any memory of what it was. As the medications go into overdrive, I feel even hazier than before, and I am overrun with the sudden desire to be in every room I have ever been in. Yet all I ever find inside of them is the realisation that most things I would have died for yesterday do not mean anything to me today and how pointless attempts to stretch out significant moments only lead to them slipping behind that much sooner. All these rooms could be interchanged or deleted at a moment’s notice, and any significance those spaces held have washed up in permeable flumes.
As I regain some awareness, I turn the television back on only to realise the panel has concluded their inquiry as inconclusive, and the man screaming before has drowned himself in his tub.
His suicide note blamed the current trend of staying in the same place and still leaving people. I think nothing of it. To round up the day, I take some Prozac to lose whatever awareness I have regained. As a translucent light from the distant moving cars bleeds through my window, I
realise how the person I once fell in love with has disappeared in time and that it has been far too long since I stopped confusing happiness with feeling loved. I can no longer feel my legs; my whole body is slowly losing its strength, and it is getting harder to stay awake.
Instead, I try to focus on a different memory at a Cherry wood dining table. Where I felt sadness that my parents didn't have the time for me. Over the years, long before I started taking any Amantadine, Zyprexa or Majoven XL to cope, even longer before I started spiralling down, before I kept going in circles, before I knew everything happens only a finite number of times, before this vague sense of longing for memories, places or people. I often strived to start over a brave new world with hydro-powered gears, where the hours do not roll over continuously but rather in intervals.
A world devoid of mysticism and the concept of days gone and days to come come to form a continuous, endless loop. In a world where it is not a mathematical certainty that what you are feeling is being reciprocated and felt by someone, or even anyone else. It is the norm. The residents of the new world will not be subjugated to answer labyrinthine questions of who they are or what they want. A world built on Camu’s ideals and an egalitarian justice system.
It has been so long since I last thought of that fantasy that the world's infrastructure is lost on me. The realisation of how much time I had on spiralling downwards, coping through prescribed drugs, and writing all of these down on the thighs of all the people I clung to leaves me feeling frantic and pitiful.
As forever ends, the fact that I can still think of myself at my parents’ cherry rosewood table proves that I still have not overdosed, but I am afraid it may also be evidence that I have.
