Still alive, sort of. Here's a chapter from my novel i'm writing:
Goodbye Blue Sky -
A novel by Travis Wilson


Chapter 1

The Essential Art of Escapism

“Sing me to sleep,
Sing me to sleep,
I’m tired and I...
I want to go bed,
Sing me to sleep, sing me sleep
And then leave me alone,
Don't try to wake me in the morning, because I will be gone
Don’t feel bad for me, I want you to know,
Deep within the cell of my heart I will feel so glad to go,
There is another world, there is a better world,
Ohh ohh... there must be
Ohh oh... there must be
Ohh oh... there must be
Ohhhh oh....

Asleep –The Smiths


The winter hit Seattle with an icy vengeance, as if Mother Nature had grown tired of its rape by mankind and had decided to throw it’s wrath upon us. The showers of ice-cold rain persuaded most of the populace, including myself, on Birch Street, to stay inside.

I myself was among one of the people cozy inside my cramped studio apartment. I watched the falling rain, while my head was in the clouds from 8mg of intravenous Dilaudid. I needed it to escape this season which also seemed to manifest itself in my personality. I needed it to function.

I knew the holiday’s depressed most people but I didn’t know how many people just wanted to say “Fuck it all,’ and gun down Santa Claus and all of his reindeer in front of the horrified faces of all the children watching the blood, tissue, and miscellaneous organ pieces within the fallout.

I wanted complete escape from the sickening holiday spirit, or death. I’ve always chosen escape, no matter what shape it took on.

Most people don’t know it, but escape is an art form much like painting. It involves skill, grace, and the tools in which to operate. I wanted to constantly make masterpieces, and I often did.

Pharmacology was my trade, and drugs were the tools of my peculiar art form.

I approached the living room window with a blistering euphoria and I proceeded to look out the window.

There was nothing but the horrible rain still, coming down to cleanse the corrupt streets that housed all the secrets of human nature.

I closed the blinds, and dizzy with an unbalanced central nervous system from drug interception, I faced the living room. And I saw her.

I saw her.

Her.

The woman who looked just like a flower upon a grave.

The woman whose dark blonde hair texture gave me goose bumps, the first time I saw her.

Dawn Frelette, my former bereaved.

Dawn was standing there by my couch, with the outfit she wore when I had found her, without a breath left in her. She was smiling, in a deep seductive grasp and raping me with her eyes.

Ash tray red eyes.

Was it my imagination, or was it real? That was the question, that jolted through my brain’s synapses, and which couldn’t cut through the layer of fear.

I gasped at this sight, which happend to be sitting on my recliner chair now. I couldn’t utter a word. They escaped me.

I desperately ran to my pristinely clean bathroom with internal fear in desperate pursuit.

I opened the rickety door ajar of the bathroom mirror with abandon, and crashed it behind me with the same emotion as its opening. The contents I snagged were two ampoules of Valium and a syringe.

I took the syringe, loaded up 50mg of liquid, injected the Valium and felt its force crush down on my GABA receptors with great relief. After I took the syringe out, I realized the pain that I had caused to my vein… I had forgotten that Valium is supposed to be injected slowly because of too much alcohol.

It worked, I was calm, and the benzodiazepines did the trick.

I went back and the room and was relieved that she wasn't there. I surveyed my surroundings of my whole apartment and there was nothing. Nothing but my lost soul. I thanked the benzodiazepine gods that I had not seen her again, that ghastly image that I had not seen for years.

This reminded me of Edgar Allen Poe's poem, except without the annoying squawking crow. No rapping on the door either, just full one-to-one eye contact with a dead person.

Very Normal… even this sight would make Poe scream, even if he had taken all the Laudanum and all of the absinthe in England at the time. Oh and it’s great how to remember how it ends, with the observer digging his own grave. Sort of like me.

I lit up a cigarette, inhaled it's vigorous and poisonous perfume, and exhaled the carbon dioxide and tar from my lungs.

With my shaky left hand, I picked up the loaded syringe I had left on my couch table for my nightly fix and delighted myself with the touch of it grip.

It was way too early to take it, with my schedule, but I did it anyway.

I put my cigarette into the ashtray and left it to its own devices. I took off my belt, and wrapped it around my left arm. I hit my vein, and rubbed it to get it warm and to make it dilate. I took the syringe, and performed the great act.

The syringe hit the subcutaneous membranes of my skin, pierced them swiftly and delved into the microcosm of my vein. The process had become one of an automaton now… injecting the sweetly sick and bitter venom of the opiod into my open vessel, and now it was so easy that it had become like a daily chore that one always does, without consciousness of the actions.

The syringe filled with a small punned bit of dark red blood. It had registered. I felt the awkward grip of my posturing, and held tightly to the syringe to keep everything balanced. I induced my attitude from sharply apathetic to brashly active, injected the Diamorphine into the microcosm of my blood stream, and I sharply cackled to the world disintegrating around me. A deep and orgasmic-like euphoria touched me again, and I sighed with relief. How could I ever live without this? How could anyone in this sick and demented world live without the pleasure of the poppy?

Who is Is it now rapping at my door? Can it be the sweet voice of my long lost Eleanor?

I tried to make myself laugh, but my chemical absolution had dredged my senses into a muddy jumble. Nothing was going to come out, and I guess it was lucky for me. Just as long as there wasn’t another specter… of her.

I thought of Dawn, and almost immediately I felt my narcotic euphoria dissipate, into absolute nothingness. What the hell was this?

I tried to escape back into euphoria, but I couldn’t, my opiate receptors weren’t responding to my brain.

I ran back and grabbed two more Dilaudid 4mg pills, mixed them with water until they dissolved, threw a filter in the mix, took the same syringe I’d used, and sucked it up and injected it as fast as I could.

Nothing happened.

Nothing.

What the hell is going on???

I cried. Tears streamed down my face. I couldn’t handle this, I needed my escape. I didn’t know what to do. I cranked my stereo on, and flushed my system with some vitamins.

I was face to face with the black abyss, which I had managed to escape all these years. And now it had seized upon me.

I was awash in a state of shock and in frenzy state of panick. I tried to calm myself down, but even the Valium coursing through my GABA receptors wasn't working any more.

I had no where to escape to, and only the darkside of myself, my id, to keep me company.

I continued to wipe off tears, as I layed myself down on the couch and tried to rest.

That was my only possibility of escape now... to sleep.

I turned on and cranked the stereo, and listened to Nirvana unplugged.

Hours seemed to pass by, in my state of collective shock.

Eventually, I miraculously fell into a deep, black, vacuum of sleep, with tears dried upon my face and with two empty ampoules of Valium next to my couch.

*END*