SWARTHOS

The clock on the wall, a greasy, luminous bastard, announced the ungodly hour of 10:30 pm. My lungs were a pair of overstuffed, wheezing sacks, my heart a frantic hummingbird trapped in a cage of ribs. Panic, that familiar, greasy-haired bastard, had me by the throat. This wasn’t the usual late-night existential dread, this was something more primal, a deep, visceral fear that had me clawing for air like a drowning man in a bathtub full of bad dreams.

The ER was a symphony of chaos. A chorus of sirens, the occasional wail of a code blue, and the rhythmic beeping of machines that resembled the soundtrack of a bad acid trip. Doctors poked and prodded, their faces half in shadow, their expressions a mixture of boredom and clinical curiosity. Blood was drawn, my veins protested with a dull throb. A CT scan, like being shoved into a giant, claustrophobic oven. X-rays that made me feel like a skeletal silhouette on a giant, flickering screen. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Just a healthy dose of anxiety, some bad karma, and a desperate desire for a stiff drink, or maybe a whole bottle.

Then, a ray of light emerged from the shadows. A nurse, her eyes cool and knowing, appeared with a pill the size of a dime. “This should help,” she said, her voice a soothing balm in the storm of my anxiety. And help it did, my friend. Help it did. That pill, a little miracle in white, dissolved on my tongue, releasing a wave of peace and serenity that washed over me like a tidal wave of pure, unadulterated bliss.

My body, which had been a battlefield of frantic nerves, finally surrendered to the gentle embrace of the drug. The world dissolved into a kaleidoscopic swirl of colors and sensations. I floated on a cloud of euphoria, disconnected from the harsh realities of the ER, the screaming drunks, the medical emergencies. This was a whole new level of consciousness, a world where all was right and the only concern was the next delicious wave of oblivion.

I spent the rest of the night in a fog of sweet oblivion, a testament to the miracle of pharmacology. They finally released me, the sun a hazy orange smudge on the smog-choked horizon, and I staggered out into the dawn, feeling oddly refreshed, like I’d just stepped out of an opium den in the heart of a forgotten, fantastical city. A city that, for a brief, glorious moment, had held only a kaleidoscope of colors, a symphony of blissful sensations, and the warm, comforting embrace of the drug. Now, all I needed was to score myself another dose, just to keep the bad demons at bay, just to keep the peace, just to keep my sanity from crumbling into the abyss.