Dead Saturdays
#6 of The Diary of Lucifer Stone
I can’t remember the last time I started drinking on a Saturday by early afternoon. Worse yet, I really don’t care that I’m doing it now. I could say that it helps to drown out how utterly miserable I’m feeing at the moment, but that wouldn’t be true in the slightest, because adding more shots doesn’t make me forget what the hell happened earlier and what it’s going to mean for a while.
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My Saturdays are just that: My Saturdays. It’s the one day of the week that I never make plans to go out, never accept invitations to do anything, never invite company over, nothing. Saturdays are the days where I just stay home. If I answer the door, I never let anyone in. I seal myself off I this apartment for the sole purpose of being free of my meds for just one day.
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It’s illegal, and I know it. Maybe that’s why I only do it on Saturdays and the occasional Sunday. But I keep that much more of my sanity by keeping one day to myself, I think. Otherwise, I’d only have the early mornings and late nights when I need to be asleep.
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It’s like, colors and lights are just brighter. Sounds are just clearer. Things just matter. I always have something to do on Saturdays and there’s never a moment where I’m just sitting and staring at my computer screen thinking to myself ‘Why should I bother…?’. There’s never a moment where I’m laying in bed feeling like I have no reason to get up. And I can smile. Honest, real smiles.
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You’d think that with modern medicine, someone would have figured out how to make something that can control the basil radiation without having such a potent depressant effect on everything else. I wouldn’t have a problem keeping on them if that was the case. Maybe they want them to be that way on purpose to curb the craving to use our eyes… but it doesn’t seem to make a difference to me. That underlying itch is always present and it manifests itself in a stray thought here or there. Knowing that I have the power to kill someone and wanting to see it happen. On the meds or not, it’s always there. It’s just that it seems a little less important when I’m on them.
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But they’re prescribed by the state. Weekly prescriptions that I have to get refilled every Monday before work. There are only so many basilisks in the city so they can afford to keep us in a database and monitor when we don’t come to get our pills. If we’re sick, we have to call and have them delivered. If we’re out of town, we have to notify them beforehand and get our meds in advance. And daily, during the daytime hours, we have to walk through the fog and nothing seems to matter.
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And if I didn’t have my Saturdays, I think I’d have gone insane by now. Maybe manic… something. Saturdays remind me that how I feel during the week isn’t the normal way I should feel and I hold onto that. Losing that freedom is a tragedy that it seems no amount of shots will let me forget.
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Because a cop came by earlier.
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She announced herself as an officer as she knocked on my door and my first thought was that I was going to be arrested for statutory. When I opened the door and let her in, I made a point to look away from her eyes. I remember panicking a little inside because there was no way I’d be able to keep her from realizing I was off my meds if she picked up on me being a basilisk… and unless she was just doing a blanket investigation of all the tenants nearby, she would have seen a file about me.
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When she said she was from Basil Crime Unit, I was relieved. It’s not the first time an officer from that Unit has come to speak to me and it won’t be the last time. Since there are so few, whenever the cause of death in any murder investigation is clearly basil radiation, the Unit fans out and investigates every registered basilisk in the city. It’s kind of normal, to be frank, it was just very poorly timed.
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Of course, it also meant she was trained specifically to deal with basilisks so she picked up immediately on the fact that I was avoiding her gaze. She called me out on it, and as unwilling as I was, I met her gaze. The forest green lenses of her protective spectacles turned a shade of olive and she merely nodded. Had it been any other day of the week for this to happen, and it would have gone without incident. But she had to come on my Saturday.
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To be honest, there really isn’t much to tell and what left there is to say, I’m really not in the mood. These Saturdays are how I keep my shit together. My bits of fresh air where I don’t have to worry about putting up with other people’s shit or feeling like I’m stuck in a fucking haze. And now, they’re gone for an â€unspecified length.â€
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As much as I respect officer’s of the law, I can’t help but feel like calling her a rotten cunt, though really, she’s just doing her job. I was served the unofficial papers of my probation on the spot and the station will get back to me with them within the next few days, but even still, one thing remains clear: I’ve lost my Saturdays.
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Until the end of it, I’ll be flagged for random visits from members of the Unit at any time of the day or night. If at any point I’m found off of the medications, I will be immediately arrested with an expected prison sentence of no fewer than 2 years. My prescription has been doubled and will be checked more thoroughly every week when I go to get it refilled. There will be no time when I’ll be allowed to be unmedicatedâ€"not even in my sleep.
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And the worst part is that I can’t conjure up any emotion for it. There should be a boiling rage and deep sadness that makes me too furious to type, but it’s not there. I run it through my head time and time again and think ‘this is outrageous’ but there’s no matter how many times I think it, there’s never any passion behind the thoughts.
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I don’t know what I’m going to do, really. I’ll survive, of course, but still…
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Maybe a couple more drinks will at least take the edge off. At least it’ll make morning come quicker.