Sobriety is a Nap on a Desert Highway - LGW

 Sobriety is a Nap on a Desert Highway

Lili Ward

The last few days of it have become a long waterlogged pipe in her memory, all one object, washing, washed. 

The driver's seat of the car is damp with flat white, knocking it in the slurring rush of throwing all her belongings in the front seat, it bleeds through her tracksuit pants and comforts her shivering legs, a milky bath. Fingers are searching the radio seeker like a juvenile DJ, waiting to hear a kind of music that doesn't exist, nothing satiates but Classic FM may at least drown out the Tinnitus. Pulling out of the driveway sharply, gravel scrapes the front bumper but she’s sure it just licked the part that's being held up by duct tape anyway. Slowly inching out onto the street and down to the freeway, the wheels bump a staccato rhythm on the uneven road, she prolonged the movement by turning down a rocky laneway.  Liking the feeling of being unable to control her body's location, giving in to the bump of the road, knees drunkenly knocking on the edge of the steering wheel. The freeway is quiet today, it's a Tuesday at 11 am and a big perk of her unemployment is the privilege of an empty road, she’s always asleep during both peak hours anyway so her unperceived driving can be as sloppy as it is. Merging left with the right blinker on she catches herself monitoring the car's speedometer, a signpost that she's not high enough, she always knows she's high enough when she can only stare straight ahead while driving, her eyes don't wander to any mirrors or have an affection for the dash’s useless information. She has come to believe in the last year of having her licence that a lot of road rules and ‘suggestions’ are mere conspiracies, including the idea of needing to always have both hands on the wheel. This welcoming of said idea as misinformation has allowed her to get a lot done while also driving: 

Eating, rolling cigarettes, smoking cigarettes, butting out cigarettes. 

Her task for now is to unwrap a benzodiazepine and nibble it in transit. A limp arm reaches to the passenger seat, feeling the contents of each bag as if in complete darkness, a small smile escapes the left side of her mouth as she hears the melodic crinkle of the pill packet. In well rehearsed stumbles the fingers manage to release a brick from its foil cage and drop it into her lap. Relying on muscle memory of the choreography of the last few weeks, the pill is halved with a sharpened pointer fingernail, one part set aside in an empty takeaway cup in the console and one is lovingly placed on her tongue. Relief is dissolving in her mouth as a white liquid of saccharine docility drips down her throat. 

In 30 minutes she will be the friendliest person in the carpark.

Parked diagonally across two spaces, Chopin’s Nocturn No.8 leaks out from the car's one working speaker and is broken only by the bass of an older man's voice. Eyes opening, she lazily scans the figure coming towards her. His hands move rhythmically to and from his mouth, two fingers pressed together, the rest tucked into his palm. 

A cigarette, he’s motioning for a cigarette.

“Got a spare smoke?” he says,

She replies in her head

“A cigarette, can I have one?” he asks

Collecting all the mucus in her mouth and swallowing it, making room for a reply.

“Yeah of course, sorry, yep” 

Her fingers resist instruction but she rolls it slowly and places it in the man's hand.

He is leaning into the left window staring directly at the ground, sporting a half missing knit jumper under a technicolour florally embroidered kimono of sorts. He reminds her of a bag her friend brought her back from Bali in Highschool.

“I like your outfit” she manages

“I don't have an outfit” he says

“Ok”

His pointer longingly leading to the remnants of her flat white,

 "Where'd you get that soup?” he says

“It's not.. It's more of a co-, just down the road, just down there, go left”

****

13 days sober in the lukewarm stickiness of comedy night at the local pub, she’s attempting to befriend the night time. Something usually so endless and bitchy, needs to become unchemically-assistedly restful, honestly relieving. 

Shifting her weight from either side of the beer moistened vinyl stool, tapping a stuttered rhythm onto the wooden table, her fingertips linger on each beat as they fight to separate themselves from the ancient tack. She slips out in the climax of a joke about the Frankston line, sliding between the squinted eyes of drunk laughter toward the corner pile of shedded jackets and unsupervised bags. Finding the velvet corner of her friend's floral bag, she sifts through what seems to be almost everything this girl owns and pulls out a notebook and a pen, softly arranging the bag again to look untouched and squeezing into a discarded zip up hoodie. 

Carefully closing the door behind her, the service bell sings her micro exit track, she faces forward to miss the damp looks of her friends through the fogged up pub window and crosses swiftly on the main street. 

Watering eyes from the stinging cold create an astigmatism vision of the passing shopfronts, blurred and vibrating. Each one a new inescapable pop up ad for variously shaped and coloured treats she can swallow so as to not feel like herself, so as to not endure. One golden drenched sign seems to read

“XANAX:  Numbing liquid gold in your area, horny and ready for your mouth”

She thinks of the man in Maidstone who dotted the eyes with love hearts on the baggies he would leave between his front porch couch cushions. She thinks sweetly and often of him and of his naive handwriting, but she’s too tired to walk to Maidstone now anyway.

She has come to enjoy the ritual of unwrapping, anything can be a present if you wrap it up tight enough, so as to lessen her cravings she has begun to wrap up her everyday items to busy herself with the ritual. Pre rolled cigarettes in an eclipse mint tin fastened with a floss ribbon, coins and notes resting in an old doily, a leather bound notebook with chord wrapped around it upwards of ten times. Taking her time and taking up space, she extends her arms out wide, making rowing movements, until the notebook is completely free of its bondage. She places it down next to her tea and orders Number 17 and a cold soy milk. She finds a lone blank page near the back of the journal and rests the pen in the top left hand corner until the ink bleeds enough to reach the top edge.

*****

“Thursday 4th September

Things i wish i could do simultaneously all at once vibrating when im in a manic episode:

• Chug my soy milk like its beer and tell the waitress to “keep em coming’

• Masturbate

• Masturbate to porn (they are two very differing activities)

• Read my whole book collection and then become the author of it and then publish a short story based on the first chapter of each page of the book and

• Sell everything i own

• Apologise to the person im sleeping with about my depressive actions and text messages

• Send more text messages to the person im sleeping with that make me sound depressive

• Thank my mum and dad

• Get all the money back that people have ever owed me and spend it immediately on subletting a light filled room in a queer- gender affirming sharehouse within fifteen minutes of my workplace

• Find other people in a manic episode and vibrate next to each other

• Masturbate but it doesn't end

• Finish all my twelve steps

• Get a bipolar diagnosis from my hot psychotherapist”

****

In a car on the way past the South Australian border, a scene plays out through the vignette of its window at 2X speed. Thousands of acres of barren vineyard, sunburnt tree stumps fossilised into amorphous crucifixes. The blood is no longer wine but a few sultanas left to shrink in the Red Cliff’s sunlight. The feeling is better immortalised as a set of plastic grape table decorations, how many times will I as a small child bite into the acrylic simulacra before learning that they bear no real taste or nutrition? Remaining unceasingly insatiable?

 

All the moments in between having things in my mouth are spent planning the next thing I will put in my mouth, on a culinary journey to replace my habit of snacking on pharmaceuticals.

The same way a bachelorette living alone doesn't bother to clean the pan in between uses, heralding the bespoke flavours of an eternal soup. I don't brush my teeth after food so as to always have a meal inside my mouth or at least the ghost of one to binge on in between waiting for my next culinary delight. I'm suckling on the shadow of a Subway salad to occupy my mouth while we pass the border, texting myself the names of rural stores:

Second Chance

Country Chicks

Sunraysia

Glory Box

Mocha Mecca

Lime Legends

Dr Snip Vasectomy (walk in, walk out)

As the city becomes a grain in my mind's eye the farther we drive I can taste the feeling of walking through it, a headache brought on by the smell of burnt milk, a constant phantom backpack complex, long past the physical wearing.

I'm walking around The CBD, shrinking past fellow pedestrians as if bearing that extra circumference, nursing the desire to dig out more negative space from my shape to increase the flow of walking traffic, to accelerate the efficiency of myself and my peers. On my way to use the Mcdonald’s bathroom (In a dribbling boycott, I take extra hand towels and stuff them into my jacket pockets to further exhaust their supplies and power), a tradesman is attempting to access the underworld through the porthole of a main street corner, picking it opening with a wrench exercising the same familiar caution he would when excavating the lint from his own belly button. I watch him and use my tongue to ferret around for a snack in my own mouth, relieved to have found a popcorn kernel between two molars that will buy me some more time before my next meal. I trace the edges of the salted shell with my tongue, letting saliva accumulate to allow the salty mixture to coat more of my tastebuds, heightening and prolonging the whole experience.

A group of young friends are told by their leader that they are heading in the wrong direction, all turning simultaneously on the axis of their dominant feet. That's right, I thought to myself, they didn't seem the type to be headed North on Swanston St. 

I continue North on Swanston St.

At the feminist red light I take Fionnuala’s hand to comfort my hunger. Attempting to be satiated by another form of fullness, but I am not hungry for love and her presence doesn't even touch the sides, I finish what's left of my kernel while digging my nails into her fortune line. 

A movie made by and starring a million tiny microplastics is coming to cinemas next month, its impending arrival announces itself psychedelically on the side of the passing tram and I'm completely depressed. “Please stop squeezing my hand” says Fionnuala.

****

I'm putting pressure on the inside of her palm, two squeezes to signify that I would like to stop touching now, we are on the road to perfecting our non verbal eternal conversation. We spit up red dirt as the car slows at a truck rest stop. I've taken up rural interior design accidentally, dragging gravel into the public bathroom in Malmsbury, kicking it into corners, finishing the terrazzo with a fine dusting of red dirt. The soap of this particular town smells like a current lover and suddenly they contract in my mind. I am glad to have humbled something so previously lionized in my recreation of them. My projected divination of them is subdued by a new association with council purchased soap, this kind of shrinking is a mutually beneficial tempering that I'm sure they'd appreciate. I can now inhale the saccharine bathroom air and feel the hands of not just one woman but a million tired drivers tracing lines on my inner thigh. 

In the backseat of the car, on the road again my clean hands trace the seam of my underwear and up toward my scalp, grazing a clean line never breaking contact with my body, an acceptable stim. Mulling on a recent community diagnosis has allowed me to embark on a journey of female unmasking, which in the capacity of this road trip involves me attempting to sleep in front of other people. I, not unlike the rest of humankind, am at my most vulnerable when unconscious. 

Arranging my limbs liquidly around the perimeters of the car I'm twisted into a safe enough shape to at least tease myself with the prospect of sleep, but regardless of a primal yearning for rest, my brain cannot give up this opportunity to do vital social research and observation. Calculatedly, if I can appear unconscious I am able to observe a more unguarded dialogue between my fellows and gather mimicable phrases and insights, delicious. Deliciousness again coats my tongue, as an unattended outback pothole produces a sickly reflux from my throat, an acidic milkshake of lost but not forgotten meals, this shot will allow me to push back my next meal at least another half an hour. Another round, back down to the entrance of my underwear and cleanly once again up toward my hairline, pulling at the front strands, stretching them out past my brow and feeling them bounce back in toward their roots. I wanted to grow my hair out so that if i ever needed to promptly sleep and didn't have a sheath of fabric to block the light over my eyes i could use my hair swept across my face, but the cutting of my hair has been a perceived liberation and the defeat to ‘beauty’ of growing it again could be easily misconstrued for throwing in the feminist towel?, but really i know it could just extend my possibilities for rest-on-the-go.

I wrap a t- shirt around my eyes and pray for sleep. Non assisted, un chemically induced, old fashioned sleep.