Memoirs of Dementia #5
Pandora's Box
Leonardo da Vinci had opened the Pandora's Box. And everything inside is the same secret behind Mona Lisa's smile. I know that secret; it is the secret of the universe. And it contains legions upon legions of both angels and demons. The squadrons of angels and demons are sitting quietly in that box, full of a million futures and a million possibilities. Leonardo knew all the contents of the box, but he used it for the good. He turned himself into the Renaissance Man: the scientist, the artist, the designer. He knew his power to create unlimited things as long as his mortal body could sustain. He didn't marry because he was doomed to design a million ideas and a million inventions. Albert Einstein, on the other hand, knew the same secret. But he used it the other way around. He built the atom bomb for the Nazi.
I've opened the same Pandora's Box two days ago. In my last post, dated three days ago, I mentioned the same box, but I didn't know what the hell was inside. It was a box of many curious things. It was the box that killed Schrödinger's cat.
The first time my mind opened up to it, ribbons of rainbows flew and soared across vast empty space, the flying rainbows building roads and highways in an endless display of wild and roaming daydreams. 8-bit music played in the background. I was the protagonist in the arcade Fry was playing in the first scene of the first episode of the first season of Futurama. I beat King Kong and I scored. Bling bling bling! said the machine. Coins showered down the floor.
That was the beginning.
The Pink Pill
It sat in the dead center of my left hand, the pink pill. The size of a toenail, it was fat and squat, like a flattened egg. That was the pill in my hand, my hand attached to my body, my body in the kitchen, and the door was open, and I was about to get a cup of water.
Seven steps away from me was a drawer cabinet. Inside the top drawer is the foil pack where the other pink pills were humming, pretending to be eggs bearing androgynous angels of good deeds. At the back of the foil pack are purple texts that say:
SODIUM VALPROATE
VALPORIC ACID
VALRPOS (R)
500 mg
CONTROLLED
RELEASE TABLET
I dug the internet and found out that the pink pill kills babies in pregnant women. Irreversible mental retardation among kids, the kids all boxed up in their zombified bodies and brains, without a spark of hope to be alive. They're stuck in eternal nothingness. Limbo. That's why I hadn't been drinking the drug. I knew it was poison.
According to Wikipedia:
Sodium Valproate is the sodium salt of valproic acid and is an anticonvulsant used in the treatment of epilepsy, anorexia nervosa, panic attack, anxiety disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, migraine and bipolar disorder, as well as other psychiatric conditions requiring the administration of a mood stabilizer. Sodium valproate can be used to control acute episodes of mania and acute stress reaction. Side effects can include tiredness, tremors, nausea, vomiting, and sedation. The intravenous formulations are used when oral administration is not possible.
Yesterday though I had another hypomanic attack. Everything was rainbows and purple clouds and teddy bears and green rolling hills with huts and little trees and a steady stream of pure water. It's the same feeling of a deluded bum on the beach, talking in slow motion and flashing the peace sign, his eyes glinting behind dark glasses. I don't do ganja, but it was a similar feeling, except that mine was hyperactive. I was bursting with so much mental energy. And it was even aggravated when I sniffed the freshly opened black notebook that I just bought. It smelled like heaven. SNIFF. AHHH. Pure and absolute bliss.
All I wanted last night was to get some fucking sleep. Maybe my sister and my boss and my ex-boyfriend were right. Maybe I should just take the pill all this time. To turn things back to the way it used to be, before I started working as a travel writer.
Before this job began, my mind was inside the Pandora's Box. It's all dark and comfy inside it was as if I was sleeping inside a coffin. That was me before, and that's me again now. I'm back to being apathetic and grumpy and bitchy and cynical. Of course, my wit is back and so is my focus.
But that's not all there is to it.
Back to the pink pill in my hand. My hand attached to my body, my body standing in the kitchen next to the kitchen counter. I forgot to say I was holding a black cup in my right hand. I poured water in the cup, put the pill in my mouth, and shot my head back with the water. The pill was so horrible it bore the taste of cyanide.
And then I sat in front of the computer to watch the latest episode of The Big Bang. On the computer screen, the girls are dancing in a taxi going to Las Vegas. The boys are in the apartment celebrating the absence of the girls by playing Dungeons and Dragons. For a fleeting moment, I missed watching Futurama. The Big Bang was nothing artistic compared to Futurama. The Big Bang is for the masses; Futurama, for unapologetic intellectual bastards like myself.
Ten minutes into the episode, my head was beginning to grow heavy. It felt like a small tumor was planted in my skull, and the tumor was expanding. And then in a snap, my brain was being paddled to death, in a hazing. The pain was the worst nightmare of my life. It was even worse than burning myself alive in 2007. My body shook and the torment showed its signs. My body was rejecting the drug, and I vomited like a toilet egressing pure black and evil shit into a canal. I spit phlegm and frothed saliva and a smudge of pink, although the pill never came out. It slid down the bowels of my stomach, and my stomach swallowed it without a choice.
My ex-boyfriend ran to my apartment to comfort me. He put me in bed, where I wailed and shrieked and writhed in pain. My cries permeated through the molecular structures of the walls of my room, echoing off the village like a sonic boom. I was pain personified.
In the midst of it all, I remembered: I have friends who smoke pot. I flew out of bed, grabbed my phone from kitchen, and punched "Call" on B's number. But my head was in so much pain I started wailing and shrieking again, in the kitchen. It was no different than being given the electric shocks of a death sentence. Like a heartbeat chart, the shocks came in spasms, in between which I cursed and slandered the Dr. Frankenstein who created the goddamned drug. M, the ex-boyfriend, took the phone and waited for B to answer. M explained my condition and said he needed some pot now. But B was driving, on the way to neverland. So, never mind. M called one of his friends. In 10 minutes, C crashed in with the gift of freedom. He had a clear sachet of dried herbs in his hand. I was saved.
C rolled a foil into a pipe. While he was building it, I wailed and shrieked again into the chest of my ex-boyfriend. My ex still loves me, he loves me incorruptibly, without question. He is addicted to all my warts and bruises, and I am his only hope to go on breathing. But I kicked him out my life because he bores me now. He's a piece of rubik's cube that I solved in five years. He wasn't called Mindtwist for nothing. But he makes me feel empty. After solving him, all my love drained away. Not a single drop was left behind. We were over. And that was that.
I was shivering and chattering while C himself rattled, building the foil into a tube. Finally, he finished building one, but the foil and paper were on the wrong side, so he ran out and took another film of aluminum foil from the cigarette packet from the store next to my apartment. This time, the build was right and I smoked my first joint. He apologized for the delay; he was himself getting paranoid.
The first puff of the herb cleared my head right away. The thick black fog lifted from my skull. The coffin lid was opened, and I shot up, blinked, resurrected. The rest of the evening, the herb battled with the pink pill. Chemicals zapped and surged like chaos inside my body; it was a battleground of angels and demons. Which side won? I wouldn't want to find out.
The Pothead Princess
The rest of the evening until 4 am, which is a little over three hours ago, I went into a trance. I listened to a playlist of ambient music while crouching in a fetal position in bed. My ex-boyfriend hugged me from behind. I didn't want him there, but I had no one at the moment so I had no choice. I couldn't be left alone.
The whole night I don't know whether or not I slept. I feel energized and revitalized when I hopped out of bed to document this evil pill and the corruption of the pharmaceutical drug industry. I had lucid dreams, I was surfing through the waves of the cosmos and I was wide awake, the music playing, and the visions flying. It's the next level after the ribbons of rainbows and teddy bears. The herb was rocking me into a lullaby. Ganja was incorruptibly good, and I was the pothead princess.
I don't want to write my visions. It's too good to share with people. The visions are the same things in the Pandora's Box, the same secret behind Mona Lisa's smile, the same secret behind Leonardo's limitless inventions. The visions will be the highlight of the book I'm writing. I'll just tell you one thing: it is the vision of everlasting freedom. Heaven on Earth. The book will turn everyone into a Renaissance Man. The Philippines is in the dark ages, and the age of enlightenment is coming. And it all begins in that thick black book.
I am doomed to write.
20.05.13