“You want all of these?”  He asks with minute disgust, or what I think is disgust.

“Yeah.”

“Well, I’ll have to make some calls.  I don’t carry that much of this at once.  Come back in a few hours, and I’ll see what I have by then.”

I leave.  I walk out of the door without looking back.  The hot sun burns my eyes before I slide my cheap gas station aviators onto my head.  The dark shades hide me.  My lunch-break is almost over, so I head back to the office without eating.  My empty stomach is already gurgling so I fantasize about the vending machine in the break room.  That giant box of goodies has helped me through many days in the past.

The office is dull, and my skin is warm from the glares that greet me on my way to my cubicle.  Phones ring ring ring dully in the background with the click click click of keyboards.  I feel my heart thump as I try to get comfortable in my ergonomically correct chair.  The lights above me hiss and flicker just like the screen before my eyes.  My head feels empty.  My mind is unable to focus, and I care little of my surroundings.  The only thing I can think of is getting my drugs.  I need them.  I’m fiending for them.  Just thinking about the possibility of not scoring makes my breath ooze out of me, and my stomach drop.  There’s no way I can get through a day without them, especially in this office, with all these people, all these eyes.  I need to be sedated.  I need my mind to be altered and contorted in ways that aren’t normal to me.  I need to take a trip inside myself with the help of pills.  I need to fill my blood with chemicals that course to my brain to make this life easier to live.

“He doesn’t look good today.”

“I know.  I’m getting worried.  He looks like he’s been awake for days.”

“Days?  Try months.”  Whisper muffled voices from behind a cubical wall of make-believe privacy.

“Do you think we should say anything?”

“It’s really none of our…”

My focus drifts to the blinking screen in front of me.  I know I should be doing something, but I don’t know what.  I just stare in expectance that it’ll do it itself.  My eyes begin to lose focus.  The paper on my false walls blur and meld into a fuzzy vision of soft nothing.  I lean back.  The ceiling does the same.  It’s happening.  I need to pop some pills.  I feel my heart jump and jive with my stomach.  Is this a heart attack?  My feet, hands, and arms tingle.  I worry.  I try to stand.  I see from above the clouds the rat’s nest of cubicles working as an intricate organism.  No eyes look up at me.  I know because I’d feel them.  Beside myself, I walk to the bathroom.  It’s empty so I lock the door.  The masked mirror plays tricks with my mind.  It’s showing me a man that I’m not.  It’s showing me a mess, a wreck of a human, a candle about to melt away completely.  Teeth grind as my jaw locks tight.  Hot sweat bubbles out of my brow.  My legs tremble and shake.  Breathe.  Breathe.  Breathe.  Breathe.  My fingers are so tightly gripped around the sink before me that my knuckles whiten, as though the bones are ready to pierce through.

—— this.  —— work.  I practically run out of the office, making a narrow escape.  The sun shines high above in the sky, looking down on me, intimately intimidating.  I look for the cash in my wallet.  I hope I have enough.  I hope he has everything on my list.

“Hey, do you have it all.”  I say without patience.

He looks at me, judging, and hands me a paper bag.  I fumble for green zombies of great men, and place the bills in his delicate hands.  The exchange eases my heart.  The bag rattles like a snake; it’s as poisonous.  I walk outside and seek privacy.  I need to be alone.  I don’t need judging eyes looking from innocent perches cast upon me.  Hidden in an alleyway, I indulge like a kid in a candy shop.  I shake a fistful of rainbow pills into my hand and swallow as hard as I can.  I devour so many that my stomach feels full.

I juggle pill containers in one hand, and my prescription in the other.  I need to make sure everything’s here.  Diazepam for my anxiety attacks, citalopram for my depression and OCD, trazodone for my perpetual anxiety and insomnia, where’s my buspirone, and my dextroamphetamine?  I need those for work.  I can’t work without them.  I can’t function as a Joe Everyman without any of these.  How am I supposed to earn a living if I can’t focus?    

I head back to the pharmacy.  I’m agitated that the pharmacist forgot some of my pills, but I’m too sedated to actually care.  It just irks me that a professional drug dealer can’t even get it right.