My mind is constantly racing with a running commentary of everything I’m expecting, and experiencing, and being. And let me tell you this. My inner voice is an evil bitch. She’s sneaky about it, but she fucking hates me and she barely tolerates other people.

I used to say it was the creativity that was my main drive for smoking weed. And that is partly true; many of my greatest ideas and stories have been thought and written high. Including this one.

As soon as I inhale the devil’s lettuce, my already racing thoughts intensify.

the journey’s my brain has taken me on, sparked by a single thought or observation, has always been of a certain genius that even Kanye would be impressed with. It’s amazing - the lines I’ve written, the conclusions I’ve drawn and decisions I’ve been able to make because I’m stoned.

But today I’ve realised it’s much more than that. I realised that, actually, the only way I’m able to properly perceive myself is when i am high. As in, birds eye view way: I can interrogate my darker thoughts and understand my thought processes, because for some reason, I’m removed from it? Being high makes m able to understand comments, conversations, and the hidden yet obvious meanings behind interactions I had a weeks ago. That’s why I’ve always said that I am a better girlfriend, sibling and friend when I’m high. I don’t just react. I think, I understand, I do?

You don’t know how many times I’ve had an argument with my ex or been angry at him for some reason. In the moment, I am completely one hundred percent in charge of my own mind. I understand her fully, and therefore don’t second guess any of my actions. Only when I am high, a week or two later, do I get hit with the unhealthiness of it all. Words actually land in brain, things he may of said or tried to tell me, pleas he tried to make. But I couldn’t see it then. When I’m high, I see myself, from a higher (lol) position, like I’m standing outside of my body. And honestly, what I see, is not pretty.

I live in my thoughts, and my inner voice is an evil bitch.

But I am not my thoughts. Except when I am - which for a long time, I have been. She just has a hold on me. She’s convincing, powerful, extremely fucking clever - and she can make an innocent situation seem like anything she wants. She bends reality to her will, and I lap it right up.

Her control ebbs and flows, and the reason I’m able to write this now is because, well, I’m high… and I’m doing the work to fight her off everyday with affirmations that feel silly to say and telling her (I’ve named her Rebecca), to shut the fuck up and leave me alone - but sometimes I forgot and sometimes it takes me too long notice shes even the there.

So why do I get high? 

Cause when I’m high, me and Rebecca are two different people. I really see her then, you know. and I see the damage she’s been doing. To me, to the people around me. It’s honestly heartbreaking. And I guess this is the root of my creativity too, like I’m able to put things together in a more elevated way, cause I literally am a fuller version of myself.

I pride myself on being a intelligent and critical thinker. So imagine how long it took me to realise and admit that I am NOT self-aware. The damage I can do, is coming from me. And the fact that I don’t control my own mind, body and soul is not anybody else’s problem - so being this way is going to rightfully piss a lot of people off.

It wasn’t my fault, whatever made me this way. But I’ve let it have control of me for too long. It’s time to sort your shit out girl, HEAL. There’s a whole life out there you could be living. There’s a whole other person, brighter and happier, hiding inside of you.

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with her eyes shut and expression sedate she wants to spread her arms wide and fall nape first into it.

she wishes she could drown in it but she’s too afraid to go in

she wants to stumble through it

playfully,

confidently like she deserves.

she wants to grab it and squeeze it and hold it and inject it

into the vein

the warm and wet ooze,

silk,

she can feel it at times, wrapping around her

tightening around the neck

She tries to keep it there

but she rips it off instead

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I stream music, I stream films. I download apps, I doom-scroll. I am that confident that my phone plan is that of unlimited data that I fall asleep to an episode I’ve seen twelve times already, wake up in the middle of the night, re-load it once more and immediately fall asleep through it again. I repeat this lunacy several times a night. The voices of Lorelai and Rory are unknowingly draining my access to the outside world.

On the 12th of September, I receive the text that tells me that I’m poor. The message says that I’ve used up all my data. It’s strange; the money in my bank is still the same, but the revocation feels more stripping than if hundreds of pounds vanished from my account. I feel like Lacie in that Black Mirror episode Nosedive: my premium access has been revoked and, yikes, the view from down here is darkness. The message says that my data resets on the 23rd. Eleven days. Eleven. That’s nothing, I think, then I sit on my bed and to google how much it costs for one gig. The answer doesn’t load.

The expected

It fascinates me how many times I forget that I no longer have access to the internet. My fingers launch TikTok without even realising it and I watch a good chunk of a story time before its abrupt stop. Only then do I remember that I won’t be hearing the end of this juicy tale. I scroll. The next clip lasts ten seconds before it stops. I scroll again. Each video plays for less time than the last until no new videos load at all.

It costs five pounds for 500mb of data, so.

I explore through the apps on my phone - turns out I have a lot I’ve never seen before. Some entertain me for a short while, a lot of them need internet to function.

During the days, it’s okay. I go to a café to work. I discover offline videos. I download music and hours worth of podcasts. I ask my sister to share her netflix password - this makes me think I’ve cracked the system. Then the system cracks me; there’s a limited number of downloads per person now apparently.

I sit uncomfortably in the nothingness of it all. I start liking it.

I adapt quickly. I download illegally. I scroll through my gallery for media consumption. Texts don’t come through, even though I’ve told people to send it green. I start leaving voicemails and that quite feels like me.

The surprise

I plan my days around my routine internet fix. There’s a pub opposite me I start to frequent at night to catch up with what my friends are up to online.

Each day a pressure rises from my stomach and presses against my chest. It intensifies alongside the passing hours I’m restricted from the news. I think of the hundreds of WhatsApp messages that are waiting to be delivered to me, and the senders confused about the one tick that they see. I speculate on the topics of all the important emails waiting, and I grow anxious about the urgent things that I can feel need my attention.

I get abit a lonely too, I haven’t had a chance to speak to friends for a while. But it’s nice to have a good reason to leave the house now.

I don’t go inside the pub tonight because it’s a Saturday night, and it’s packed and I’m all by myself. Leaning against its grey wall around the back works well. I connect to the wi-fi and I refresh refresh refresh.

A few reddit notification flurry on my screen but besides that?

Nothing.

The internet is working. A web search glides in without protest. I visit each one of my apps and there is nothing to see; I feel gaslit by that piercing urgency that’d been poking me.

My friends are fine, I realise. I was never waiting to hear back from anyone.

The urgent sting, I now see, was the absence of literally, nothing.

I thought I was above it all, the parasocial hold of it, but it seems I had mistaken the access through the screen,

for connection with - yikes -

people who don’t even know me.

the end.

THE EPILOGUE

AKA The Introduction when this was still an ‘article’ lol

I had just moved into my first apartment, and it’s perfect for me. The only downfall, I realised, as my eyes canvased the space, taking in the bay windows, appreciating my expertly organised novels, marvelling at the perfect couch i hunted down on Facebook Marketplace and trudged between the back roads of my city to its new home,

is the concept of bills.

I hate bills. I hate the set-up, the financial burden, the responsibility, and I hate the actuality of them: like, actually, why do we have to pay for water?

I’m telling you this because the experience of going internet-less was not one bit a part of a grandiose self-development plan. I had no viral video-esque intention of Detoxing My Life or De-Rotting My Brain. The experience, which embarrassingly seems kind of radical today, was born from a stubborn procrastination. And the accidental root of which it sprung, the way it snuck up on me and drop-kicked me in the face, made the experience that much more significant.

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I wanted it to not be

To get to speak to you

Sometimes I still speak to you

And you still love me and

I tell you, there’s a new thing I like to do

You’ll get a kick out of this

Full sushi platter, with a side, for lunch, at work,

I smile. You know I hate office days. You smile and say ‘proud’, that I’m doing something, you know, to combat the shit. Then the smiles fade because I know, you know, that I can’t eat the heart-shaped pile of it.

I lower the intensity to gauge whether or not all the noise is necessary, then wail again more quietly. Panting very child-like, I roughly wipe my cheeks with my fingertips and collapse backwards, allowing the excess droplets of liquid to trail down my face and settle in my ears. Okay, I’m happy with that, and I know I’m done here because for the last forty seconds I’ve had the same fantasy in a loop in my head:

I imagine myself rising from bed and walking into my kitchen, where I open one of the three beers I found on the street last night (it made my day seeing those in the fridge this morning). I chug about half of it and reach for my cigarettes, which I resent because after the millionth attempt to quit, they taunted me in the illegal off-license last night. I go outside and smoke and smoke until I feel sick and carry myself back into this exact position on my bed.

After a while, when I’m salivating at the thought of that cold beer between my lips, I take a minute to change into somebody my housemate will recognise.

I take a breath and neutralise my expression. Chin-first, I walk into the kitchen and by the time I’m exiting to smoke it’s business as usual because she’s laughing at my commentary and I don’t even remember what I said.

The universe urged to stamp us out. We defied it. We clawed and pushed and burned through our worlds to be together, and once they were incinerated, we turned on each other. We sliced through one another, held mirrors up to one another and forced each other to look at our own insides. They were gruesome. We saw clots and boils we’d been ignoring our whole lives because the pain of confronting them had been unbearable.

We tried to fix our ugly guts, we tried to fix each other’s. We held up mirrors and blamed the pain we saw on the person who showed us. We would slice, to stitch, just to slice again and have to stitch, as it was designed so that only we could properly tend to each other’s wounds. It was as if our fingers found a crack in each other’s souls, and we both applied pressure until the mirrors shattered. And once they did, he used a glass shard to carve a line in the ash between us; two twisted flames splitting asunder.

Soaked in deceit, the tattered bandages holding my spirit whole unravelled at once, and the delusions I had formed, that he helped build each time a knife was thrust through my heart, were flushed to the surface and left there to rot.

There’d be no cover-up this time. No sweet lies. Just a rotting heart, severed by a thousand knives, with no one left to bandage it.

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The rumble of the black bins behind startle her backwards.

The sight of a group of girls walking towards her shocks her heart still.

She’s frozen.

The thump of a ball being kicked, young boys’ screams from a nearby garage roof, and the concept of having to run for her life are all too much to bear. Panic pins her.

A vision takes over: she sees herself retreating, tripping backwards, trying not to fall.

She calculates how fast she can run, how long before her lungs fail her, whether they’d be able to catch her.

Then envisions them chasing. All of them, from every direction.

She hallucinates taking them on, one by one.

Could she fight?

But then she sees it, the gleam of a silver knife - no, a sword - teasing out of their pockets, killing the possibility of escape.

They’re coming for her now, and there’s no getting away.

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Malcolm Spade had become pretty skilled at managing his girlfriend’s anxiety in the one year and nine months they had been together. He soothed her with his voice, holding and shushing her like a baby when she’d open up about her family’s treatment of her. When she’d panic about how little time she was spending on her assignments, he’d coach and uplift her, telling her how intelligent she was, and help her map out the next time she’d sit and focus on school.

Malcom knew to laugh emphatically when she’d spew out – although carefully drawn out and compelling – wholly circumstantial theories about her housemate’s secret hatred of her. She was adamant that the muffled voices she had heard from her fifth-floor bedroom were her friends sharing anecdotes of all the times she had been unlikeable, like maybe a joke she made last night didn’t land properly or perhaps she didn’t contribute enough to the flat dinner, ate a tonne, said something weird, and now, they’re laughing about how rude and strange she was. Malcolm would laugh at these manic assertions because laughing showed ridicule, which would calm her in the moment and allow her to view the tale she’d devised through his lens: extreme and unlikely.

Malcolm knew how to curb his girlfriend’s hangover anxieties by always being drunker and more embarrassing than her whenever they went out, and not caring a bit about what anybody thought and allowing that carelessness to wash over her, too.

And, Malcolm has methods of managing the relationship anxiety his girlfriend displays as a result of all the bad men she has trusted before him. More expertly, Malcolm has now figured out how to prevent these anxieties before they even manifest. That’s why, when he arrived at his old friend Kenny’s house, he made sure to snap a picture of the two of them to send to her, just in case her imagination got the better of her, and just in case she conjured up the worst, most horrific-case scenario.

***

Her legs wrapped securely around Malcom’s torso and his arm held her tightly in place.

‘Nine…and TEN’ Malcolm straightens his legs after completing the final squat with his perfect little weight. ‘Told you I could squat you.’

‘With one hand too, very impressive’, her eyes fixate on the veins in his biceps, which were gleaming in the July sun.

‘Not like it was hard, you’re tiny.’ Malcolm knew that girls liked being called that. Her shy smile indicated that she was not an anomaly.

They had spent the day outdoors, lying on the grass of Blue Park, named so after the signature blue hydrangeas lining the ripe grass. She took a swig of their packed lunch: a plastic water bottle filled with a vodka and lemonade mix that made their faces screw each time they drank from it. He loved how she was on the same vibe as him. A lot of girls turn their noses up at the proposition of day drinking on a Tuesday afternoon. And she’s beautiful too. Her face and lips are plump and shiny from a slathered application of Vaseline. Girls he’d met in the past would wear full faces of make-up the first, second and third time they’d show up to see him. But nothing turned him on more than natural beauty and the confidence it took to wear it. Her rich espresso skin was filtered only by rays of sunlight and her black eyes, (which, despite the external boldness she expelled focused anywhere but his own) sparkled under the same light. Malcolm’s interest peaked higher than usual. She’s way too beautiful.

‘I just can’t believe we’ve never met before.’ Bristol was a small city. Malcolm swears he would have noticed a girl as fun and gorgeous as her.

‘I told you. I don’t go out.’

‘What a shame to keep something as gorgeous as you locked up doing assignments,’ he pulls a face with the last word.

She giggles. ‘Even this.’ She signals between them. ‘You.’ It’s very out of my comfort zone.’

‘Well, I am honoured to have released the study princess from her tower of textbooks. Malcolm flings her over his shoulder, and she squeals from the surprise, and Malcom’s penis inadvertently twitches.

‘And you do medicine too? I’m going to tell my mum about you’, he continues.

Her dark eyes roll with an exaggerated flair, and her small hand swat him playfully once he puts her back down on the ground. ‘You don’t even know me!’

But Malcolm felt like he did know her, and she felt like they’d known each other for years, too. The whole day had been so naturally perfect, or perfectly natural, or downright inconceivable. Their connection was static. They kept staring into each other’s eyes, touching unnecessarily and admiring one another when the other wasn’t looking. He couldn’t peel his eyes from her lips. The bottom one was slightly pink and images of how they’d look between his legs infiltrated his brain. She noticed the fixation, intuitively licking her lips. She loved the overt attraction he had towards her. And he couldn’t hold off any longer.

Malcolm snakes his arm around her waist, accentuated by the yellow sundress that hangs so sexily down to her thighs. Her breath hitches, and sparks of sensation pulse in her chest, her wrists, her stomach, between her slim thighs. A rush of warmth encases her entirely when his smooth lips meet hers, her mouth immediately parting, and their tongues merging in a slow, sensual dance felt rehearsed and perfected. She pulls away, then they kiss again, and then she pulls away, and they both nervously laugh together.

The remainder of their first date consists of lots more kissing. He strokes her legs as they lie on their sides, facing each other. She drew shapes on the exposed areas of his skin. The plain black T-shirt and shorts he wore meant there was plenty of canvas to work with. And they spoke. A lot.

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‘That’s kind of crazy and, like, really not okay.’

Malcolm had just finished telling the story of how he almost died from Malaria when he was 14, because his dad hadn’t believed him when he said he wasn’t feeling well during a trip to South Africa. Only at the last minute, when the symptoms had become aggressive, did they go to the hospital, where they were told that one more day would have killed him.

‘Yeah, well,’ he shrugged. ‘I guess I was the kid who cried wolf, always playing pranks and always trying to get away from spending time with my dad.’ Malcolm put the spliff to his lips and drew a long, dangerous drag.

‘Okay, but still,’ she loved how honest and fair he was about things. ‘He’s your dad. Did he even, like, say sorry?’

Malcolm didn’t try to restrain his laugh. Shaking his head he replied, ‘he got pissed at me for having a weak immune system’.

They were both laughing now, heartily and lovingly, like they had been all day.

‘But seriously though,’ she continued, flipping herself over from her back to face him. He stayed facing up. He was so attractive. Even rested, his side profile was sculpted like art, a deep line of depth curving from his cheekbone to the edge of his jaw, creating a natural contour that she envied. A small fuzz of hair sat politely on his rectangular chin, and a few wispy stands freckled his upper lip. He had a young face but old eyes, and a playful smile that seemed to get him everything he wanted.

‘I really admire how nuanced you are about this, and everything really.’ He turned towards her. ‘Like, most guys or people would be so pissed at their dad for that, but you’re actually able to look past that and recognise what might have caused the –’ she softened her expression ‘– series of unfortunate events.’ She looked at him apologetically. ‘And, most importantly, you’re not afraid to look at yourself as part of the cause, even though you’re the one who got hurt.’ The prolonged eye contact sent a fresh flurry of butterflies to her stomach which ram against her insides, like a warning. ‘And that’s pretty cool’ she said, suddenly shy. ‘So, go you, I guess’.

‘Thank you.’ Malcolm smiled, and after a while said, ‘I’m hungry. Let’s go get some food’.

She pouted her lips like she was considering something devious, and then offered, ‘let’s order it to mine’.

On their stroll back to her house, the fingers on his left hand threaded through those on her small right one, and Malcolm used his unoccupied hand to craft and send a quick message.

‘Kenny and I are doing dinner, see u later
miss you baby girl, I love you.’

Two kilometres away, Malcolm’s girlfriend receives a notification that made her heart soar and cheeks rise into a radiant smile.

‘I love you too’, she quickly types back, before continuing to chop up onions for (now) tomorrow’s dinner.