qarrtsiluni

I feel like I’m flying. Floating – I’m a transparent helium balloon, the string cut from beneath me; it’s taking me up towards the night. I pinch myself; feeling the tears tingling on my cheeks. My tongue feels soft and velvety. Beams keep appearing when I close my lids. The light rolls around me – a million optic fibres swaying from the heavens. There’s a bleach taste in my mouth. I know I’m back in my familiar place. I am high again.

Tonight – I want it to last forever. I wake up under a Christmas tree, in a room with the dawn warming my sweating skin. I’ve wrecked my brain after a New Year to end all New Years. I hear music playing from the decks, ‘Ghost Town’ on repeat. There are people laughing, drinking vodka, a man turns himself into an upside down crab, shuffling on his hands and feet across the inspiral carpet.

The journey was rough, and now, I’m feeling out of place, sick, just want to open my eyes and be sat in an Oak tree orchard. I need this to stop. The drugs. I can’t take it anymore; I don’t know who I am?

A man with thick black eyebrows takes my hand, pulls me into the kitchen; makes me a Sea Breeze drink. It hits my stomach and I retch. I throw up in the sink; fill it with pints of vomit, blood stained and acidic – no food for 4 days. He cooks up a saucepan with water and a carrier bag of mushrooms in it, with sugar to sweeten the taste. He cracks a joke, lights me a fag. I come round a bit. I drink the tea; black nipples turning grey as they swill around in the sieve.

A girl wraps me in a fur coat, pulls me down to the park, and I have to piss. There are people around, but I don’t care, I climb onto the back of a pick up truck, filled with tools and sheets, pull down my trousers; wet myself by accident. I piss in the wrong place. All over my hands. Don’t know where I am. Lost. Again.

The evil laughter continues. The ground shifts from underneath me. Is this what the Shamans feel like?

The girl with pale green eyes and red hair, she looks after me. But she won’t stop talking. She is my new best friend. Nobody else would bother to pick me up off the tarmac covered in piss.

I sit in the lotus position, try and centre myself, but she keeps talking, at herself, at me. I want the noise to stop. The grass carpet is rolling up and down, dipping in the winds that blow through my hair.

I take my wet trousers off; sit there in my knickers and vest, trying to be sick again, shoving my fist down my throat. I close my eyes, and float up into the skies. Your face glistens from the stars. I know you are around the corner. Fate will save me. From the mess in my head, and damp sweat that rots me in the red brick alleys of Woodhouse Moor.

by Adelle Stripe of Straight From The Fridge