Meds

You'd become a simulacrum of your former self. You knew it. People whispered it as you passed them on the street, your past colleagues and lovers all harmonious on the idea that you were a ghost. A phantom in a three piece suit. But their hissing was redundant. You didn't need their vindictive warnings. You'd noticed it the day you left the hospital. Things in the world once so beauteous to you, so stunning  in form and manner - well now they lacked edge, they faded into one another like watery hues dripping down an easel. They merged into blobs of mundane necessity and there was nothing left that thrilled you anymore. The foibles of the world irrelevant, those happy little quirks more impertinent still. Standing in a queue to collect your medication you would pick at the fresh scars delicately thrashing through your thin skin. You'd flick at them until they opened, until they cried tears of crimson down your shaking hand. Trying desperately to feel it - to be hurt by it. But you'd become numb. You'd swallow down the designated cocktail of happy capsules to induce such a perfectly vegetative state, never questioning it's exigency in your life. Only remembering vaguely the horror of the alternative. So as the days blurred by, the memory grew foggier. The colors less vibrant, the screaming less emphatic. Until eventually you couldn't remember at all why you were living your life in such a monochromatic haze. So you missed a dose here, and took a night off there - until you were so clean you could practically hear your blood squeaking. And that's when the voices came back. Old friends collecting in the darker corners of your frantic mind, asking you to do them favors, then commanding your service. The voices took you over and you became an imitation once more. Only this time everything was emphasized. Every little defect the universe suffered made to seem like it was swarming towards you, down a hill, in a car with no brakes, driven by a man you'd wronged. Every nicety so tantalizing and unreachable that it tormented you as you lay sodden between your bed sheet, longing for hallowed slumber. Until one day  after sleep had evaded you for nights on end, and you could barely remember your name - you were reminded of a time not long ago when medication subdued your deranged insanity, calmed it to the point of non-existence. You wondered softly to yourself, among the screams of a thousand stern voices, whether the same situation could occur anon. So as the companions you kept inside your temples urged you to desist, begged you to abstain - you drank down the bottle of abandoned tablets, and celestially closed your eyes.