The woman is a drug.  Or are your feelings for the woman a drug?  Or is the drug the drug?  It could be all three.  You could be zoned out of your brain on over-the-counter asthma medication and you could be a victim, as always, of your own fear which is the cojoined twin of hope for you.

And it could be that the woman is a drug.  There is always that.  After all, she told you, in her mad manic way of telling you everything about her, almost too soon, like a trailer that gives away the whole movie, that she had done a lot of speed, a lot of it, and then she had quit the speed, gone to rehab that her start-up had paid for because good content managers were hard to find, and they had sat in little circles and talked and there had been the inevitable stories about what would happen to your health if you continued to keep doing all these drugs, kept living this life, and that was enough for her.  She quit, then and there, and had never gone back but you can’t help but wonder.

You’ve known a few people who did a lot of speed.  And the majority of them are never the same again.  They don’t stay magpies, stealing glittering things for their room.  They don’t find their mind festering with paranoia and fear and an increased sense of hyper-vigilance.  But they move too fast, they talk too fast, they laugh while they shift from side to side, too loud and too quickly, too in on the joke before the joke has even arrived.   Their lives are too rich and too brittle, like strings of rock candy pulled steaming out of science class.

And she is like this, the woman, in many ways she is like this.  But more, after less than a week, you had become that way, too.  You were losing sleep and checking your email, and checking your phone and fretting about your room and worried about your weight, and being surprised by how quickly the clock husked the hours.

It was midnight, it was one, it was two.  And you were always someone who enjoyed your sleep, so you didn’t like to live like that, that wasn’t you.  So who was it then, tossing in your bed, turning on your TV, trying to make the sound and motion exhaust you to the point of oblivion?  Who was flipping the channels, going to the bathroom, lying down, holding your hand up to the toothpaste blue of your clock alarm, wondering if you could actually see your bones through the gossamer of your skin or if you were simply trapped in a waking dream?  Who was that if it wasn’t you?

And you wondered if maybe you had been dosed, just by talking to the woman, just by hearing her laugh, just by hearing the way her sentences ran loud, then suddenly soft, turned corners sharply and seemed to dart away from you, only to appear a moment later, laughing.  Her words were children on a playground—exuberant, loud and also a little frightening.  You were always tensed, even as you laughed with her, the way a parent might tense at a playground, knowing that it would only be a matter of time until someone got hurt.

Maybe she had taken so much of the drug, she had become it.  Or maybe she had taken so much of the drug becaue she had already been it.  A more crystalline golem, made of meth and cocaine and diet pills.  The Queen of Speed, and her body was the kingdom and the kingdom was her body.  Thinking of it, you tried to imagine the woman asleep, and the closest you could come was to picturing powerlines on a still night—unmoving but still audibly thrumming with power.  You imagined the woman being not exactly still, but rather cycling so quickly that she appeared still.

And now you worried that you had become like her, without even touching her, but merely by being awakened by her, by being smitten with her.  Your body, always sensitive to drugs, was reacting merely to the woman’s existence in your life, and your had become as bad as any speed freak—pacing, whistling, talking to yourself with a fervor you saved for intimate conversations, awake at all hours, lost as to the day and the time.

You wanted to clean all the time.  You never felt clean himself, now—although you feared water a bit.  The shower felt like a hundred people tapping you on the shoulder, it sounded like it wanted your opinion.  Noises would not soothe him—even ballads seemed too stressful, too active, too harsh, somehow.  The world had become spun confectioner’s sugar, flat but sharp at the edges, brittle and somehow too sweet.  It could not be seen without grimacing, unless you were talking to the woman, in which case the world was still too sharp, but you didn’t care.  When you were talking with the woman, you were accelerated beyond caring, in a world where all the emotions ran together, like colors on a spinning disc, until there was only one color, and it was the color of frantic, breathless joy.  The joy that almost outpaced the fear, until the two of you hung up the phone, or you reached the end of her message, or the world had just spun itself down and all the colors were separate, and you could see by looking at the wheel that there were more painful colors there than previously.

You found yourself talking to yourself in a horrible Ren Faire patois, a barely recognizable stew of anachronisms filched from movies and old comic strips.  “Milady,” you’d find himself saying, “milady, please.”  “Please, milady, it if pleases you,” and “I have not the endurance to run this race much longer, milady.”  These words came to your mouth from some place touched in you by the drug that was the woman.  “And yet, if you see that I stop not, I am unceasing in this race, you will see the depth of my affection for me, and it may yet please you.”  Shakespeare ground into an unrecognizable mush, bits of Marvell and Donne and Webster and Prince Valiant pared and resliced, cut and minced and diced, chopped into a fine paste that stuck to the corners of your lips when you spoke alone.  “Milady, milady, please.”

You found yourself working on having a fine paste for a throat, for having a slaughtered calf for a soul and a wrung goose for your heart.  You were working on letting yourself be dead, and that was your idea of being dead but also alive—a lazy simulation of Renaissance plays, a mouthful of inattentive pastiche, a servant’s demeanor to the twisting of your own mind.

Perhaps the drug was the drug, although you hadn’t been using the inhaler for more than two days.  Or perhaps your feelings for her were a drug, and behind those feelings, the other feelings, the desire to serve, the desire to be overlooked and so to also be able to overlook all the feelings that battered you.  Or perhaps, again, the woman was the drug.  And if the woman was a drug, you were in trouble, because the drugs never came after you, but the woman would if you got too far away.  And there were teeth in the spaces of her words, tiny slivers of teeth, and you could feel how they would tear you apart if she wished to turn them on you.  You were trapped, until the woman didn’t want you, and then the withdrawal from the drug might tear you up, someone would tear up a losing lottery ticket,  and you’d be through.

[Written sometime, early December, 1307 words]