The Last Year of Life

Day 19. Bedside. 6:48AM
This morning I arbitrarily woke up at 5 in the AM and knew that it was an awakening which would not provide me the opportunity to return to sleep. I turned in my bed for a couple of quick moments, decided that combating this certain feeling would only hang a crippling weight of misery around my neck for the entire day. I got up and immediately lit a yellowed joint of marijuana that I found underneath the television set the night before. Mindy had probably rolled it in ancient times, but we were too inebriated to smoke it in the moment. And it probably slid out from behind her ear where she wears all of her joints and cigarettes. And it probably got pushed under the television set when she was dancing to a song that she liked and I didn’t like. I smoked the joint and I put on some ethereal music by an artist with a name that I can’t pronounce. I smoked it quickly, slurping in heaving breaths, sat on my bed in the still darkness, hands on my knees. I didn’t think of anything. I didn’t think of one thing. My head was empty. There were no thoughts, no memories, no aspirations, no feelings. I was hearing the music, but I was not experiencing it. I did not perceive it. The sense data from the music and the enveloping environment around me was entering and it was exiting without interpretation. The moment existed. Then that moment did not exist anymore. And there was not a single trace of its existence in my mind. Everything was mechanical, like breathing, like aging. The alarm clock beside my bed that I still set just as a precaution let out a piercing tone at quarter till seven and it snapped me from this unplanned meditation. That was the first time in my life where my thoughts were completely stopped, my brain completely vacant.