Contemporaneous: Chapter 64
64. I drink and drink, the waitstaff always approaching me with uncertainty, like one of them wants to tell me this isn’t a bar, but they’re all teenagers – they don’t have the courage to approach some foreboding-looking fifty-year-old who’s drinking peacefully (but, given I’m drinking alone, self-destructively), and tell him he has to leave. The cook looks like he might, though – he’s about thirty, but a rotund guy, with a big, meaty, crewcut head that’d might’ve just come out of his wood-fire oven. Give him another decade and his bulk will turn to fat. Right now, though, he’s got this affable look about him – maybe it’s cliché,…
Contemporaneous: Chapters 62 – 63
62. A terrifying fear strikes me on the train ride home. I didn’t take my own life. I didn’t reset. I haven’t relived the last week three times in a row. All of that is fanciful bullshit, the product of an unrestricted imagination – and imaginations should be fenced in somewhere. That’s how you define reality. But mine’s gone. I remember when I first went through anxiety, having a public hospital psychiatrist telling me that because I was a writer I was prone to losing touch with reality – he actually told me that. Then, when the panic reared, I’d tell myself I’d be okay, I’d try coping, but I…