• The Other Me

    The Other Me

    ‘The Long Hard Fall’ i. Allie was a girl who’d had a crush on me in Grade 6 (twenty-five years earlier) and chased me through high school. Then she married some guy and that was it – until she rang me unexpectedly and we swapped stories. She told me she’d had three kids and was unhappily married. I told her I was pretty much where I was when we’d last spoke over fifteen years earlier. As her marriage disintegrated and she separated, we became friends, and then later developed our own relationship – much to the disapproval of my parents. They saw danger: I wasn’t working; she had major financial…

  • The Other Me

    The Other Me

    ‘The Fugue’ iv. As I resumed my daily life – and even went out a bit again – I decided to cull the Xanax and cut away the rest of it in the space of a couple of weeks. Going off the Xanax so rapidly, there were withdrawal symptoms – shortness of breath; and, worse, muscle cramps that tore through my body. That was to be expected. Xanax also acted as a muscle relaxant. In its absence, my body probably wondered what the hell was going on. To hell with it, I thought. This might’ve been a situation where, previously, I would’ve panicked. I would’ve obsessed with worry about what…