Hangover

I haven't overdosed in six years. Not on typical vices anyways. Overdose feels dramatic. I once read a blackout from drinking is overdosing on alcohol. It seemed fitting. I can remember every time I did; I can count them on my fingers with some to spare. I mean to say I haven't been hung over in over half a decade, but alcohol was never my only vice. It wasn't even my main. I thought the infrequency meant a lack of a problem. I guess all addicts think that. I had rules, though. I bet all addicts do. I'd only get blackout drunk once a year- to get the demons out. I'd only do cocaine with rockstars. A handful here, a handful there, could a few harmless nights a year be an addiction? Now, my expensive scotch from a world traveled sits dusty on a shelf. I don't touch it anymore. I have cannabis from three years ago. I don't touch it, either. Forgotten relics of a long-dead me. To the untrained eyes, I've successfully battled my demons, given up my vices and any hold they may have had. I know better. In truth, my dirty little secrets, my darkest impulses- my vices were never so simple. Now I get hungover from other indulgences. Seratonin sprints that better men don't get sucked down in. I read. How could that possibly be a vice? I write. I think. I remember.

I weave in and out of other worlds. I romanticize correspondence, places, people, and things. I feel so profoundly the parallel lives that run, walk, sprint, and crawl against the veil of time and space that separates them and me. I consider them, and I pity them. Sometimes I revere them. Sometimes I spin for weeks, the other worlds as vivid as my own. When my home is quiet, and the symphony of my loved ones sleeping fills the room, I wander, untethered between the realms of fiction and non, past and present. Future. It's a more subtle overdose. I'm never nauseous; I don't feel terribly unlike myself except for the small tremor of exhaustion that seeps into my skin, settling in my bones. The regret that used to tinge the mornings a hangover would declare itself no longer arrives. I think it's because before, I chased vices to forget, and now I chase them to remember. Before, I tried to dull, to numb. Now I chase the hits to fuel my art. To brighten my spark. To expand my mind. I get drunk off pretentious notions of enlightenment. I get high on a recontextualized memory, understanding it more than I ever could have when it was formed.

It's now a curiosity that drives me. It's quite beautiful. I wander through the garden of my subconscious and turn over rocks—ones I've placed pointedly to conceal and ones that landed without my conscious knowledge. Under each is a surprise, some fond. Others, best forgotten, recovered, but the dopamine rush of discovery fuels me through the disappointments. Clarity rather than blurred vision and slurred words. The frantic uptick of my heart beat with anticipation and excitement rather than the dull slowing and eventual numb, dead sleep. The best high I reach now is creation and success. I wouldn't trade it for the world, new hangovers and all. Victorious vices.