On Drugs

I haven’t published in weeks. Not for lack of trying.

I’m up at 4:00 AM, laptop open, fingers on the keys.

I tell myself I’m editing. Journal submissions open in September. I want to be ready.

My cursor blinks, mocking me.

It knows.

The truth is, I’m testing myself, testing to see if I can write while I’m clean.

So far—no.

Elephant on my chest

We’re at the kitchen table—Keylea, across from me, hands wrapped around her coffee mug, elbows on the glass.

My laptop’s been open all morning. Yes, since 4. But still no words on the page.

“You’re not writing,” she says.

“I’m thinking.”

She studies her coffee. Takes a sip. “Three weeks of thinking?”

The cursor blinks between us.

“Are you taking your… supplements?”

She calls them my “supplements,” if she mentions them at all.

The chair squeaks beneath me.

She sets her cup down—peers into me. “When you take them, you’re patient. Kind. You laugh. You write. When you’re off them…”

I meet her eyes.

“Do you wake up angry?” She’s serious. “Mad at the world? Seems like you’re looking for a fight.” She doesn’t blink.

I go back to my cursor. Of course, it blinks.

She goes on. “I sense it when you walk in the room. You think it’s easy? All this tension. That I don’t feel it?” Her eyes go narrow. “You’re not the man I fell in love with, Paul. Not anymore.”

She sits back. “I love you, Paul.” She says it with conviction. “The medicated you. That’s the man I love.”

She looks away. “I’m not sure I can live with… whatever this is.”

What she doesn’t know

I know she loves me. I know she does.

What she doesn’t know is that my “supplements” aren’t vitamins.

They’re psilocybin. Magic mushrooms. Natural enough, but classified as a Schedule I narcotic. Any detectable amount is enough to send me back to prison. Maybe her, too, just for being in the same house.

If the authorities came for me, they’d take everything — the house, the cars, the life we rebuilt from the wreckage.

I grow them myself sometimes. Buy them other times, dry. Grind them up and pack them into little gel caps. Cash only. Never the same source twice.

Every capsule is a felony. Every batch a bet they won’t kick in the door. Not tonight.

What I know too well

I know the stakes, the risk. I know the sound a warrant makes at 6 a.m. I’ve seen how fast they strip a life for parts.

And still — without the capsules, I’m unbearable.

Depression first, heavy and sluggish. Then anger. Rage.

I used to drink it away. Started at fourteen. Drank till I was forty-something. Booze made me fun, easy, loose. Probably a little reckless. But it saved me from worse trouble.

Until it didn’t.

When I came out, sober, the bottom was right there, sharp, jagged, and waiting for me.

I couldn’t take it. Doctors, drugs, therapists, nothing could budge it.

“If this is life,” I thought, “I don’t want it.”

Nearly ended it with a box cutter in a warm bath.

What makes it different

Psilocybin disrupts the pattern.

The brain’s default mode network — the seat of the self. Your repetitive self. The same assumptions, stories, and habitual patterns.

Psilocybin opens your mind, lights up other networks, synapses fire across distances never bridged sober. Entire galaxies in your brain, sparking to life.

On it, I feel calm, kind, open, relaxed—one with everything.

Not separate. Not crazy. Not ready to kill.

I smile. I socialize. I sit down to write and my sentences line up on their own, like they’ve been waiting for me to show up.

It’s not euphoria. It’s not like being high.

It’s perfect alignment. What life is supposed to feel like.

The weight of it

But the cure is contraband.

With or without it is the difference between the man she loves and the man who wakes up spoiling for a fight.

I want to tell her.

I want to believe she’d understand. But telling her would make her complicit. Give her the same nightmare I live with:

That every knock at the door could be the one.

Insurance policy

I keep them in a small manila coin envelope in the desk drawer, under the receipts, the ‘good pair of scissors,’ and my pencil collection.

I never take more than one a day.

Never have more than two in the house at any one time.

Not because I’m afraid of abusing them — but because I’m scared of getting caught.

Stepping outside myself

Last week I told myself I’d write this clean.

Three hours later, and only halfway through the first paragraph, I got up, opened the drawer, and shook one into my palm.

It clicked against my stainless steel wedding band.

I swallowed it with the rest of my cold coffee.

Thirty minutes later, the sentences started lining up. Everything just flowed.

That’s how I’m finishing this now.

Not sober.

Not sorry.

Still scared.