some die looking for a hand to hold

[gramarye]

Who: Wolfgang and OPEN
What: Antipsychotic medications have been known to exacerbate psychosis. There is a risk of permanent chemical dependence leading to symptoms worse than before treatment began.
Where: Badside, Mog Hill, Echomire, Brock Marsh, Raven's Gate, Chimer
When: Veerdi-Shundi
Notes: FEEL FREE TO SKIP THE OP it's me tl;dring. Thread starters in comments, if none of those work just... post whatever and I'll roll with it. Also, a polyvore.
Warnings: Medical/health care. For real. Specifically, this post touches on symptoms of mental illness, drug dependence, side effects and withdrawal, medical treatment, and seizures. Very possibly TW for suicidal ideation.

He's halfway down the block before he realises he left his body behind.

Panicked, he runs and hides, waits for whatever this is to end. It doesn't. He slinks back to his bedroom at five in the morning, watching his body sleep, pacing the length of the room and wondering if he can get back inside. Eventually, it becomes less terrifying, but it is frustrating to be outside of his body while the flesh sleeps and unable to do anything -- unable to touch anything, to speak to anyone, to even be seen. It further blurs the line between dream and reality; which is which? Which really happened?

It was supposed to get better. He was supposed to Awaken and this would stop. He'd be fine, he could stop taking the meds, he could get his life back, everything would be like it used to -- when he was young and wild and free and knew he could do anything he wanted, whenever he wanted. Only this time, he wouldn't have to be so lonely; people would understand...

Instead, it's getting worse. When he's not on them, he can't tell the voices apart, can't tell what's real and what's in his head, feels smothered under the weight of the irrational thoughts that plague him. He argues with people who aren't there in public, not realising he's the only one who can see them, or that maybe they're not there at all. He gets random pains -- swift, shock-like ones and longer-lasting muscle pain, stiffness in his neck, long-lasting headaches that aspirin doesn't fix. His hands shake so hard he can't use them. When he's on them, the side effects now outweigh the benefits. The sedative effect of antipsychotics makes day-to-day living harder when he is already sleeping thirteen hours a day. He falls asleep anywhere, at any time -- on the train, at work, in bars -- but no matter how much he sleeps, it's never enough. He is losing time. He'll sit down and the next thing he knows, the sun is much lower, or else it's dark out, and he's confused and disoriented. Once, he wakes up on the floor of his living room with a paintbrush still in his hand, and his entire body feels as if it was just tazed, just one giant, sore muscle, and there's blood in his mouth -- he bit through his cheek.

It only happens once, but it's enough to thoroughly scare the shit out of him.

Above all else, though, it makes it clear that no matter how many times he smiles and says "fine, thank you, how are you," he is not functioning. He is consistently late for work, if he manages to go at all, and when he gets back to his house, he has barely enough energy to collapse on the mattress he set up in the living room, and then he sleeps the rest of the day. He needs a drink -- or six -- just to get through the day, and if he has to go outside and socialise like a normal human being, he takes stimulants. After the incident last week, he has stopped answering his CiD, and he quits one job, gets fired from another, and stops showing up for the third. Having free time again is nice. It's not much, a few hours between sleep, and even then he doesn't use it very effectively. Does some work on the house. Reads, when he can muster up the energy, the big medical texts he borrowed from a public library.

Does not like what he finds.

Clozapine has been shown to lower seizure threshold and produce significant EEG changes. Although not a commonly used drug, both clinical neurophysiology technologists and interpreting electroencephalographers need to be aware of the effects of clozapine on the EEG...

CNS Effects of Haloperidol
Insomnia, restlessness, anxiety, euphoria, agitation, drowsiness, depression, lethargy, headache, confusion, vertigo, grand mal seizures, exacerbation of psychotic symptoms including hallucinations, and catatonic-like behavioral states...

The words keep ringing in his head, over and over. He has to read it over and over again because it takes that long for anything to sink in -- he sees the words, but he can't make any sense of them, and when he finally does, he just sits there quietly and thinks about what they mean. He is not sure how long that takes.

Maybe he should tell someone.

He thinks about that, those words still at the forefront of his mind, when he drags himself out of bed, forces himself to get dressed, and leaves the house, like maybe if he just goes out and does something, he'll be okay. He has always been able to push through this before. It has been one thing after another all year, and he thinks maybe it's indicative of some kind of personal failing that he can't take it in stride like the rest of the city. He has never been strong -- he thinks -- and ten years later he has been made more brittle by a lifetime of expectations and disappointments, by the slow reveal of an unjust world he is completely powerless in.

And it has been following him into his dreams. The old nightmares -- memories of past lives, people he's been before. Some he's had before and some he hasn't, but they're all familiar because they all really happened, except something is wrong in them this time. The way the trees begin to curl in on themselves when he looks at them too long. The patterns of spiderwebs, reflecting rainbow from morning dew, too unnaturally perfectly round. The thin lines of clouds curling inwards, inwards.

Always in a spiral.

Every time it interrupts the dreams he knows he should be paying attention to, knocks him out of the memory and into awareness, but still dreaming. No. He runs from them instead, swinging from memory to memory like handholds, but when he sees it again he misses the mark and falls. No. This is real running, the background warping behind him and he has to get away, really away, because he's not even safe here and he can't tell if this is real. He only jerks to a stop because there is nowhere else to run, he's standing on the edge of a cliff that is wrong because there's nothing behind him except more ocean. The sea, all around. Deep, open water, impossibly grey.

There is more than one way to go. He looks upwards, but he can see the clouds beginning to move, twisting and starting to spiral, and -- No. Just one. He jumps.

Seven miles under the surface, there is no light. No sight. No sound. No smell. No feeling. He can taste salt water sometimes, but that fades eventually. Above him there are hundreds of pounds of pressure threatening to collapse or explode his body, but that fades, too, until there is nothing but this -- drifting in blackness, enveloped in it like an isolation tank. A Ganzfeld cocoon.

Safe. The only safe place there is.

But in the waking world he wanders around like a zombie, hollow-eyed, closer to broken than anything else and too tired to fight anymore. He would just go under, if he could.

This is his last-ditch effort to find a way to believe that not everything in the world is evil.

Comments

brock marsh.

[gramarye]

There are a few churches in Baedal, but most of the House Ecumenal buildings are like this: small, nondenominational. They say they're open to anyone, and anyone can see the effort they go to to appeal to as wide a swath of believers as they can. They mean well, but sometimes with these buildings, in an attempt to communicate how they're different from the Twelve Point Divinity, they hang up crosses.

It's not welcoming; it's watered down. There's no familiar anchor here to hang on to, just empty white walls. It feels like praying to a corporate logo, an advertising campaign with a soundtrack of easy listening music.

He comes anyway hoping maybe this time it will help, but knowing it won't. He sits down among the scattered handful of other people trying to reach out to what they think of as God, their hands slipping as they try to hold on to their old faiths in a city that bulldozes over it, and even that is not enough, because he's still not like them.

He's prayed a thousand times before in this city and it's never helped; he doesn't think God can hear him out here. In Lebanon and Turkey at least there were people like him, so He never felt that far away. His faith may not have been consistent his entire life, and much of the time after he left home he may have been alone in it, but Wolfgang has always felt like God was there. He can't feel His presence in these carefully calculated buildings which they don't call churches even though they are.

He shouldn't have come here. It's just making him feel -- what, angry?

He gets up in one forceful motion and leaves in a hurry, but stops outside the door, leaning against the wall and trying to rein it back in. He's never felt so cut off from God. Here, he's screaming into an empty room where, his entire life up until now, someone has been.

[lupa]

Somewhere between the lines of her Ave Maria, GG has slipped from prayer to contemplation, her eyes closed as the familiar words peter out, her lips ceasing to move- she has not been saying the words aloud, preferring to mouth them silently. Now they drift away, though her eyes stay closed, blonde hair over her face; she doesn't kneel, sitting on one of the subtly uncomfortable chairs with her legs apart, elbows on her knees. Bent over, bowed, her hands clasped tight.

It's the busy silence of a number of people being very quiet, talking to themselves (or someone) in their heads. She breathes in and the scents are like colours. They speak of people on their own or in tight groups, and the curiously dismal air which spaces open to the public are prone to, as if the building itself is exhausted by the people coming in and out and never staying for long. It's not like home (it's not like home used to be) where religion was sensory and tactile, wooden pews and rosary beads between her fingers, incense in the air and a congregation murmuring in sync, rising and falling like waves- their voices and they themselves, standing and sinking on cue, carrying GG along with them.

This feels like a hospital waiting room, she thinks; there's that same air of slightly damp anticipation, the same urge to try and work out what everyone else is suffering from and the same fear of making eye contact.

She falls deeper and deeper into listening, breathing in, so still she could be part of the sparse and slightly sad furniture. Her mind is blank, but her senses are running wild, and it's actually almost peaceful in a last ditch way, until sudden, sharp movement from across the room makes her head snap up.

GG sees him leave, stays frozen for a second. Some people ignore his exit, some look uncertainly over at the door and at each other.

"Crisse," mutters GG, appropriately, and hauls herself up from her chair, ignoring the less-than-holy clunk of her boots on the floor as she heads for the exit. The outside world is noisy and feels more real, less like a bad parody of itself.

God, he looks sick.

"Hey," she says. She's a tad too abrupt; it sounds more like a demand for attention than a greeting, as if she's caught him red-handed at something. "Are you alright?"

...a slightly pointless question.

[gramarye]

"I'm fine, thank you --" is an equally pointless response, and one that comes so automatically from him that it's laughable. He realises that, too, because he winces in response and barely manages to stop himself from apologising -- for what, he's not sure. The terrible lie, disturbing her, breathing her air? Someday he'll figure out what exactly he's so sorry about that he has to tell everyone he meets. Sorry, I'm sorry.

His hand, halfway into his pocket to look for cigarettes, stops. He won't light up with someone else around even though it's legal in Baedal and nobody really cares. It just seems --

Wolfgang shrugs and turns his head away. He smells like magic and medicine, violets and vetiver, paint, and a little bit of weed. Him and half the city his age. "I can't stand these places," he says. Not a conversation starter exactly and not quite an apology, more like an explanation, offered a little awkwardly. The fact that he's here at all says enough about why he bothered. Monotheists in Baedal seldom have any other choice but to come somewhere like here.

[lupa]

GG shoves her hands into her pockets, glancing over her shoulder at the not-Church. "--Yeah, they're...they don't feel right." There is, for her at least, the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Chimer, which is closer to what she wants, but somehow somewhere nearly right was worse than somewhere totally wrong. "The whole city doesn't feel right, but when it's this- it gets to you more, maybe."

It's absurd, of course, because she hasn't been able to go to any kind of place of worship in years because of the world imploding around her, but it's how she feels.

"Smoke what you want," she's moved to add, though it's not really that practical when your sense of smell is so highly developed; she's not going to be able to stop smelling weed for hours if he does light up. She can tell it's in his pocket, of course- not because she was intentionally sniffing it out, just because that's how her senses work now.

[gramarye]

Wolfgang still looks tired and sad but when he smiles, it's without that sick anger he had before and with the relief of understanding. "Yeah." His gaze moves towards the door, but... no, he won't go back in. He'll learn better than to try again someday. "I feel... bad, they have a right to their gods here, but... it's hard."

Feeling alone in the multiverse. Maybe this is how people felt thousands of years ago when monotheism was some weird new concept.

"No, ah -- it's fine. I just..." He gestures with his right hand, awkwardly -- he's just restless, wants something to do with them, and smoking is something to occupy the hands and mouth with. Something to hide behind.

[bodilesswarrior]

Barbara doesn't linger by the House out of any religious affinity; she just wants to see how it's holding up, after the attacks. She makes these rounds regularly, in Brock Marsh - noting the progress, seeing if there's anything she can do. Usually it amounts to advice, to networking, but at least it's something.

From the outside, the House Ecumenal looks much like it always has, humble but stalwart; she's reconsidering entering when the door opens.

She recognises Wolfgang immediately, but she hesitates; their last meeting was...intense, and she hasn't wanted to haunt him with it. But he looks so strained, so exhausted, so utterly alone -

So she really can't help wheeling forward with a gentle, uncertain smile.

"Hey," she says softly.

[gramarye]

He's reaching in his pocket for... something, he's not sure -- a flask, a cigarette, something to rein in the feelings he is not used to having. (Blunted affect is either a side effect or a symptom, he's not actually sure anymore. The lines blur.) But he looks up when he hears a voice, surprised, as if he's not expecting to be addressed.

Pause. "Hello."

He should make his face look -- something. 'Friendly' is more feasible than 'fine' or even 'okay,' but that's a difficult distinction to make. He makes an effort to smile. It's not a very good one, but there's effort in it anyway.

[bodilesswarrior]

She appreciates the effort, and her own smile deepens. She can't help but look him over, though she does it subtly.

"What have you been up to?" She won't ask how he's been; the answer's a bit obvious, and she doubts he'll tell her anyway - not here, not now. She won't be pressing, regardless.

[gramarye]

"Ah, work, mostly..." That is a lie, most of what he's been doing is sleeping, not that that's obvious at all. Half the shifts he didn't show up for; the other half he was late to. And now he doesn't have any jobs, hooray. He shrugs, makes a side-to-side motion with his right hand like eh, so-so.

He can pretend to be normal all he wants, no one's buying it.

"How are you?"

[bodilesswarrior]

Barbara nods; if she's sceptical, she doesn't show it.

"Same thing, more or less. I do a lot of tutoring." With a wide gesture to the buildings around them, "And I try to keep an eye on how the neighbourhood's doing."

She tries to keep an eye on Baedal as a whole, but that's another can of frustration and not something she should discuss in public.

"...I was just going to grab some lunch. I wouldn't mind some company."

[gramarye]

"Oh, um --"

Trapped between his instinct to be polite -- less to conform to arbitrary social conventions than out of a desire to be nice to people -- and the knowledge that he is really shitty company right now, he shifts from foot to foot.

Politeness wins out, and anyway he should. Probably not be alone right now. Thoughts keep bothering him, and while he can tell they're not other people's, he's not sure if they're really his. And he can't make them go away. "Well, sure."

[bodilesswarrior]

She's about ready to give him an out when he replies. Her smile is warm, and grateful. "Great! I'll lead the way."

As she turns to do just that, "Oh - do you like pizza? There's a great place a few blocks down." Her smile turns wistful, for a moment. "It...reminds me of home, a little."

[gramarye]

"That's fine," he says -- easy to get vegetarian, although he kind of doubts he's going to eat anything. They will at least probably have beer. ... it's not too early to get beer, is it. He'll check his CiD later.

He nods, indicating she ought to lead; he'll follow.

[bodilesswarrior]

She does, leading him through down the street with a comfortable familiarity that still bothers her. She never wanted to feel like that, in a place she didn't choose.

And she knows it's ridiculous, to feel as if it's some sort of betrayal, and yet.

"Are you still in Badside?" It's a casual enough question, but she speaks in a low murmur; she doesn't want to broadcast anyone's location.