Anaesthesia for the Soul

It all started with boredom. This is what led him to delve into the paralysing highs that he spent the rest of his waking hours relentlessly chasing. He always caught them, consumed them, of course in reality they actually consumed him. It didn’t change anything. He was still sentenced to serve life in this prison of tedium. A side-effect of his existence and a vicious cycle that only has one inevitable and equally vicious end. 

It was his first true love and sometimes he thought it might be the only real one. It started how any love usually starts. He innocently flirted with it until before he knew it he had fallen for it completely. That is the point where it is too late to turn back. The foundations have already been built. Any separation from this point on would only lead to unbearable anguish and an exacerbated desire for what he now desperately needed, but it did not need him.  

His first love was music, but it never truly satisfied him in the way that he needed. It wasn’t capable of filling the void within him that was crying out for something he couldn’t express. Something that the world seemingly couldn’t provide, until now. 

His true love exists in many forms. Liquids that without moderation have the power to destroy a grown man, pills that could be mistaken for candy only with ingredients more sinister than sugar. These things have an ugly appearance to most people, demons to many, but to him they were beautiful. They represented an escape from the monotony of life as he suffered it. A respite from the existential dread he was brimming with. His true love never judged him. It’s only motive was to engulf him in pleasure, unconditionally. It didn’t matter how they looked to him or how they tasted, it was the way they made him feel that captured his heart. Or maybe more accurately his mind. He was self-medicating with this one-sided romance to protect himself from the inescapable anxieties of life. 

He spent most of his days surrounded by people. Other musicians, creatives from every walk of life, but even in a room filled with people he was haunted by an unending loneliness. A feeling of being so completely alone that it simultaneously terrified him and physically pained him. He ached for something. He needed something to numb the pain. Anaesthesia for the soul. The music wasn’t enough. 

He was talented though. He wrote songs that could touch parts of a stranger's soul in ways that only songs can. He performed them with such obvious passion that it could send a chill down a person's spine. Admittedly he did not possess the greatest voice, but his courage and honesty when he opened his mouth was unrivaled by even the greatest singers. The first time his inexperienced fingers touched the pristine black and white keys of a piano it felt euphoric to him. It opened up to him a new realm of possibilities, dimensions of creativity and expression to be explored. There are old home movies of him singing for his parents with a voice so pure you would feel guilty if it was never shared with anyone else but you, and a smile so wide it could swallow you whole.    

His first real high didn’t come from the allure of music though and it wasn’t just euphoric. It was enrapturing. It did not come from his fingers being perfectly placed on the keys of a piano or the strings of a guitar. It came from his capable hands being skillfully wrapped around a barren bottle. Sometimes not even knowing what was inside of it. Only knowing that it would take his sickening torment away long enough for him to see the forgiving sunlight of the next day.

Waking up didn’t give him the comfort he was so desperately seeking. He was overwhelmed with the separation anxiety upon realising that his only love had left him. Alone. Not to worry, usually it was only an arms reach away on the bedside table. One or two generous swigs and slowly it returns. A tender embrace filled with warmth, he is completely infatuated.  

This was a love that only he had the power to end before it ended him. His closest friends, his family, they were all as perfectly helpless as he was to this unruly romance. His mother who birthed him, nurtured him, and watched him grow into the beautiful being who brought joy and calm to the world through the music that emanated from him. She is now restless and replete with questions. Why wasn’t my love enough for him? She asks herself sorrowfully. Her spirit utterly defeated, her heart beyond broken.

Watching home movies has become a distressing experience that fills the viewer with a consuming grief at the thought of the unfilmed ending. Immersing them in the horror of their inability to change the outcome. This movie does not have a director’s cut. The only theatre it is projected in is in the mind of the forsaken spectators. Regrettably they will never miss a viewing.

It is a painful paradox that the very substances that gave him what he needed to survive life, are the very same that have left him without any substance of life within his body. He did not leave a note and given the choice he wouldn’t have ended things the way that he did. This was not an intentional break-up. It is a rare occasion that a person's first true love would truly be their last. 

The piano sits in the corner of the room. Alone. The pristine appearance of the black and white keys is long lost but the beauty of the notes that they are capable of producing remains eternal. They will be untouched and unheard for some time now. When they are next played by a fresh pair of optimistic hands they won’t sound the same. Not worse. But definitely not the same. 

The room is filled with a deafening silence.

But he remains calm.