Happy Pills

Portfolio: Fiction

I lie on top of the duvet in little more than a tank top sweating profusely. It’s day three and I no longer want to give up. I just want to die. The grey sheets below me turn a dark ash colour from the liquid spouting from every orifice and bare patch of skin on my body. How much longer can this take, I think to myself, miming the words as I have no control over my muscles any more. My body makes its own decisions, being too occupied fighting itself to make good ones at that. I can barely keep these thoughts, these ones right here, from being completely overtaken as well.  Fuck those pills.

 I try to look around, only my neck can move. The room is dark. I had to turn the lights off and close the venetian blinds. My eyes couldn’t handle it anymore, the light became tiny spears piercing the squishy interior of my cornea. A little light comes creeping through the cracks of the blinds, but that is all that allows me to make out my room. The government appointed lamp is turned off and sits next to the government appointed clothes rack of four beige clothing items; I lost the hat. The government appointed table is the only thing that makes the room look like a home, otherwise it would just be a bedroom with an ensuite. On the grey vinyl top table is the government mandated kettle and microwave. I left out the silver packets of protein sauce I was going to use to make ramen noodles two days ago, but I have been stuck between lying on this bed and hovering over the toilet, so I haven’t gotten around to it.

Withdrawal has overcome me. The worst is the nausea, though I don’t even know what that word means anymore. Is my stomach supposed to emulate a tumble dryer? Is it supposed to stretch on a medieval Rack? If I keep describing the pain will I distract myself from feeling it or will it make the pain feel threatened and need to live up to the standards I am setting it? Why am I even asking these questions when I have nobody to answer them even if they were answerable?

My fingers tingle, shocks of electricity, they want to walk to the waste paper basket to retrieve the pills. I feel a flash of adrenaline. My body is conspiring against me. The shocking feeling started late yesterday, day two. I know now that I just have to wait through it. It will eventually leave me. I have to remember why I’m doing this, that will keep me strong. Three days ago, I had a dream. A dream in which I was a young child, I couldn’t have been much older than five years of age. I was wearing sunglasses on my shaved head and yellow dungarees with a bee sewn into the chest pocket. I had a cone in my hand with an unusual white substance, semi liquid semi solid, on top in a swirling mountainous form. I can kind of remember, I think they called it a “soft serve”.  In the dream I dropped the cone. It tumbled in front of me in slow motion, spilling white substance onto the concrete floor until it landed on a forty-five-degree angle. I saw my chubby young face change rapidly from the cheery rosy cheeks to puffy and covered in snot and streams of tears. I was crying, something I don’t remember how to do.

The dream wasn’t just a figment of my subconscious, it was a memory. It all rushed back to me the second I woke up. Over twenty years ago I had cried, and that was the last time I can remember. Two years later the laws changed and the Happiness Bill was brought in.  I have taken a pill three times a day since, one with breakfast, one with lunch and one with dinner. And all I’ve felt since was content. Aside from not crying since, a thought I never really dwelled on as it was a side effect and benefit listed on the bill proposal, I realised after that I had never felt the warmth in my cheeks like I had back then.

I’m distracted from my thoughts by the pointed tapping of low heels walking by my apartment; I see the shadows stop in the centre of the wood plated door. Metal clangs as a tray is passed swiftly through the gap between door and floor. I look at the government appointed clock between the door and the coat rack, across from the bed. Right on time.  The shadows disappear and they walk past. Who is this person? They’ve been doing this since I stopped taking the pills. Do they know? But how?

I’ll get up to eat in an hour; that is usually when I feel good enough to move from my cacoon of sweat and bed sheets. It’s not the mandatory eating time, but I think I’ve crossed that line. I must be the first criminal in ages. The Happy Pills were bought in to stop crimes and up general morale, that is also why they are free and required to be taken by law. I am also required by law to go to my job as a tech support assistant, but I called in sick just before I stopped taking the pills. It was a good job, or at least I think it was, it’s hard to know for sure nowadays. I miss sitting at a desk all day in that white windowless room with only Stephen for company and a black earpiece with a flashing blue light. Well, I wouldn’t really describe Stephen as company. He would just sit at the desk on the other side of the room and mindlessly do the job, not a conversational fellow. But right now, I crave his unsociability, anything would be better than this withdrawal. I have no idea how long this will all take, or for that matter what I will do when this is all over. What happens if my suspicions are proven to be true? Oh no, what happens if I was totally off the mark, if these pills are actually less than harmless?  I hate to admit it but I jumped in this without a plan at all.

 I start feeling a new torture. I feel pins and needles inserting into my eyes with the skills and pace of a master surgeon. I grip the edges of the pillow and sheets beneath, pulling and clenching in unison with the waves of stabs. I let out an audible, but muffled, creak of pain. Shit, if someone was in the hall they may have heard. I need to stay quiet. Think of something else, think of something else.

On the day I decided to stop taking the Happy Pills I was so caught up in the potential malevolence and scam created by the government, I didn’t really think about the consequences. I was prepping for breakfast, hastily pouring the contents of the cricket powder sachet into the silver tub of egg whites, I had woken up a minute late, causing me to have no time to sit down to eat and I rushed to the pill bottle. I was about to pick it up when I had an unusual thought. Why? Why am I rushing to a job I don’t enjoy? Then I sat down for a moment in shock, because I didn’t know what that emotion I was feeling was. It felt almost hollowing, there was an itching deep withing my brain and heart. What was enjoyment even? I thought we were all never going to be sad or angry ever again, but then how was I not enjoying my job. I sat in silence, like I did most days, but now I did it with racing thoughts of insecurity. The clock slowly loudened and then quickened until, I finally glanced over to it. I was thirty minutes late. Late for work, but most importantly late for the pill. Something no one had ever done before to my knowledge, let alone me. That’s when I decided to stop…

My rumination is cut short by another strike of nausea. My torso catapults up, jolting. Swaying back and forth slowly. The twitch in my fingers, and now my entire hand, has started up again, intensifying as the seconds both slow and fly past. My saliva is tainted and my eye starts twitching. Not the lid, the actual eye. No more thinking. Thoughts stop forming. Only a waterlogged brain and bodily awareness remains. I crawl off the bed in a rush of adrenaline as sweat oozes out of my skin. The room spins and lights within my eyes flash dancing colours. My limbs move like a defeated donkey in a desert.

My hand plunges into the waste paper basket.

(Photo of a feminine mouth holding a pill with a smiley face on it between the teecth by fotografierende on Unsplash)