Vertigo of the Soul

by Stephen Duxbury

Better, or worse?

No pills.

It’s getting worse. Lenses slide in front of my eyes, but it’s not my eyes, it’s my brain, in and out of focus. I can almost hear the quiet thock! of imaginary glass against the imaginary optometrist machine.

One, or two?

Every thock!, accompanied by a wave of vertigo. My world, out of focus. I stumble. My skull is a ship lost in stormy seas, my brain the passenger, thrown to and fro. As if I live in my nose, and there’s a huge wave cascading from my brain, and another rushing up from my throat, and it crashes together halfway up my face.

Where I reside, where I am, confused and slurring.

I didn’t mean to go cold turkey. I forgot to pack them. I rang the local pharmacist, but they’re dragging their heels. I can hear the judgement in their voices, nasal and artificial on the other end of the phone. I can almost hear what they really want to say, bubbling behind gritted teeth.

They say: ‘I’ve made a prescription request. Check back with us later.’

Always later.

And always, what they want to say: Why didn’t you pack your meds, you stupid idiot?

I’m mentally ill, I want to reply. What’s your excuse?

I’m having conversations that don’t exist, that I know don’t exist. I’m not delusional. I’m just in my own head. That’s all. My own, sloshing head. Another pair of crashing waves, another thock! of glass sliding into an optometrist machine. There’s a giddiness in my stomach that’s waiting to get out, the manic in me, the delusional in me. Then there’s the sting behind the eyes, the tiredness of the eyes, the stinging wet tiredness of it all, the depressive, pushing back down.

I live in anticipation of them.

They are waiting. Waiting behind the vertigo and slurring and confusion of accidental withdrawal. Just as confused as I am.

They are me, of course, and I am them.

I’m not delusional.

They slither out, testing my defences. Scratching up my chest, tickling my throat, making me want to laugh. Swelling eyes that want to leak, sagging shoulders, a rising tiredness. Another wave, waiting to bury me in sleep. If I don’t get my pills, one of them will manifest, possessing me, transforming me, debasing me. One of them will discover that this vertigo is surrender, a withdrawal from the warzone, a vacuum waiting to be filled with all those resurgent, regressive things that have hidden in the dark. Biding their time.

God, I am tired.

When I talk on the phone, I sound almost normal. A little bit of hysteria, a little bit of panic. I know what’s coming. I should just tell them, tell them that I’m losing parts of me, fleck of skin by fleck of skin. That I’m disintegrating into the harsh autumn air. Tell them that it’s urgent. My voice tries to communicate what my words will not. I can hear myself slurring, hear myself rambling. Spacey isn’t the right word. Spacey was two days ago. We’ve broken orbit and the rocket has broken into pieces and now I’m drifting, lost in space, with no up and no down to speak of.

Spinning, spinning, spinning.

If I am to go insane, I could choose a worse place, I suppose. A little cottage on a working farm, the farmland odour, musty and rich with sheep dung. A nostalgic smell, I suppose, a nice smell, even though it isn’t. I grew up near a place like this, before I allowed the city to swallow me up, a place with sheep and horses that smelled just the same. It reminds me of happier times, simpler times before all this nonsense that makes up the mess of me. Though, of course, there were warning signs even then, mania and depression lurking, always lurking, somewhere in the recesses of me. But I like the smell. Even though it’s manure. It’s saturated with memories.

Memories of how it used to be.

And it’s so different from the city, too. The expanse of green and brown and the white-grey sky, dominating the skyline, everywhere you look. There are no buildings to dominate the horizon. They’re absent, along with the smog, or the blinking winking of a hundred thousand streetlights, the ever-presence of unnatural things. It feels closer to the earth: here, I live in the earth, not on the fifth floor of some apartment. I am with the beasts and the birds that flit, effortless and purposeless, from fence post to fence post. And there isn’t the endless honking of car horns, the rising chatter of a million people that forms thick, grey clouds of pure noise. On the farm, our voices are afterthoughts, the detritus of braying sheep and singing birds and the cold, gusting wind unfettered by obstacles and buildings, whispering of winter to come.

I wish I had my meds, though.

I used to go horse-riding in a place like this.

The smell of manure. The warmth of a horse’s flanks on your legs. Everything in you is put to work: heels down, calves squeezing, shoulders back, fingers twitching. The pull of his head, forwards and backwards, the give and take, like withdrawal vertigo. The bubbling gait of his trot, wanting to explode into canter. The sudden jolts of speed before cross-pole jumps. The danger of immediate, body-throwing stops. Power and restraint.

I haven’t seen any horses here. Just sheep, dotting the fields like tiny clouds.

I trace the outline of a horseshoe in the edge of the gravel path.

The only horseshoes in the city are talismans of luck. Kitschy baubles, the bastardised corporatized alchemising of something real into something ephemeral, the fetishization of something honest and tangible and with purpose.

The outline of my horseshoe has taken on corporality, magicked from the grass. I’m not delusional or manic. When I blink, the mirage disappears.

But, if I allow it, my imagination bounds free, absentminded and unrestrained.

An abandoned horseshoe on the side of the gravel path, that does not exist.

What is an abandoned horseshoe on a farm? Not a city talisman, not a fetishization. An artefact. Like ancient bronze cooking pots dug up out of the ground, not quite talismanic, not quite functional, something that steals our wonder and our imagination and would have meant absolutely nothing to those that owned it. Something that meant nothing to anyone, back in the day, but now it is something significant, something I am imagining, something that weighs me down behind the crashing waves, something that stops the thock! of the optometrist’s machine. Or maybe my fascination with this useless thing is not a focus, but a culmination of all the confusion: the withdrawal and the mania and the depression all smelted together and forged into this thing, this thing, this nothing.

My horseshoe is made of gravel and mud and dirt, but mostly time. It is ingrained with time, the stretch of years between now and then, rusted and dirtied and abandoned on the side of this gravel path. Non-existent to all, imagined by me.

How would a horseshoe come to be abandoned on a farm?

My mind imposes rules and logics on phantoms. My imagination is put to task.

A horseshoe like this would be cold to the touch, absorbing the pallid chill of autumn, but not enough to sting. A shallow groove would follow its shape on the underside of the shoe. Maybe a slight fissure, a slight crack, just enough to throw off the uniformity of the groove, widening a segment less than a centimetre, but still, enough. Enough for it to come off the horse that wore it, enough to be scattered away by a stumbling horse, enough to become old and rusty and cold.

All because of a tiny fissure. A trickle of water, the slow oxidisation of metal against air, the cumulative pressure of every step along this gravel road… thock! thock! … all that, all those thousands of tiny instances, the sharp stones, the awkward steps, the oversights of farmers who didn’t notice the damage, all that, all that…

And then to be forgotten, to somehow fall away from the path, where it might be found and picked up and recycled… Or maybe it was deliberately ignored, endlessly neglected, oh, yeah, that thing, but my hands are full, maybe tomorrow… Until one day it stopped seeking attention, internalised all that rejection, allowed itself to fall back from the bank of the path.

Allowed itself to fall back into the grass, waiting, over the many years, for me.

There is such a plethora of causal paths, worming their way through time without anyone really noticing, a thousand thousand minuscule interactions that make up the enormity of it all. And for every one of those thousand thousand causal paths, there is a choice: a choice to attend to that path, or to ignore it. And we ignore so, so many. And, of course, we must, for no one has the time to attend to the lonely life of a horseshoe, no one has the time for every lost object, no one even has the time for every life, every animal, every person.

And we ignore so much, we ignore so much.

It is the way of God. To ignore. Because only by ignoring can we prioritise what matters, and only by ignoring most of creation can anything matter at all.

If He did not ignore us, there would be no miracles.

They are, by necessity, rare.

I feel the mania rise in me, sneaking past my vertigo. Those rambling thoughts that compare me to God, while I imagine this cold, lonely horseshoe.

Every item we think lost is somewhere, on a narrative so rich that it would be impossible to comprehend the fullness of it all.

I erase the shape of the horseshoe on the gravel path.

I don’t want to corrupt it.

If I keep attending to it, if I make it the subject of my rambling, confused thoughts, then I have fetishized it, made it a talisman. I don’t want it as some memento, some trophy, imparted with divine meaning that I have no right to impart, and it has no right to receive. Just a lost little horseshoe that does not exist. An imaginary piece of scrap metal, no longer fit for purpose.

I don’t really know what the point of all this is.

I walk down the gravel path, trying not to think about the horseshoe I leave behind. It’s quiet on the farm. I need to be careful, get back on focus. Every stray thought metamorphosizes into something monstrous, a rambling valley of diseased thought.

It’s hard to pay attention.

I need my pills.

The gravel path leads me over a slight rise. My horizon opens into a blanket of fields. The sky bleeds watercolour grey into the brown and green, smudging together like paints spilt across a canvas in my eye. Sheep huddle together, bending down to eat, grinding the grass in contented musings along the drawn-out day. If I take the time to look, I can make out the fuzzy outline of the highway, reaching out like a stretching cat from nothing to nowhere, an expanse that just is, with nowhere particular to be. I rock side to side, trying to balance myself as another wave of vertigo rises and crashes against me.

I decide to sit.

The grass on the side of the path is still wet from the morning rain. I feel the wetness soak into my jeans, across my butt and under my legs. It should be uncomfortable, but here, now, it just is. A sensation.

A sensation that, like all things, will pass.

It is cold.

A chill wind sneaks beneath my cardigan sleeves and creeps down the bony outline of my spine. The rain resumes, gentle at first, but then in a sudden downpour that plasters my fringe against my forehead.

I am still.

I feel the droplets form against the end of my nose, feel them slip loose, tiny caresses of gentle nothingness. My clothes press against me, pressed down by rain. I’m going to catch a cold, but I’m in a trance, somewhere between myself and nothing – or everything – somewhere between here and now, association and disassociation. The vertigo of the soul.

The rain ends as quickly as it began. The clouds open to a pale, hopeful blue. A faint rainbow struggles through the autumn wind. The rain is gone, but its memory is everywhere.

The urgency of wet and cold shivers along my shoulders.

I want to be still, in this. I want to let all those tactile feelings exist as a part of me, or me as a part of them. I don’t want the conflict between these sensations and thoughts and needs and wants. I want the boundaries between me and the world to become fuzzy, blurred, like leaking paints between field and sky.

I want to erase my outlines.

But it’s impossible.

And it always was.

I stand. I am sodden. My clothes are heavy on my shoulders. My feet squelch inside my shoes as I retrace my steps, finding my way back to the little farm cottage.

The imprint of the horseshoe remains, glistening with raindrop glitter.

I leave it where it lies.

I return to the cottage. I peel off my clothes. I shower. I towel and dry. I change my clothes. I sit.

I try to be still.

I watch the sky. Grey clouds reform and darken, suffocating the hazy rainbow and gentle blue of the sky.

My head swims in treacle mud.

I call the pharmacist.

‘Hi,’ they say. ‘We’re still waiting for the doctor to fulfil the prescription request. She’s here all afternoon – check with us later today, as late as you can, but it might be tomorrow.’

‘I’m really feeling the withdrawal,’ I hear myself say. My voice sounds almost panicked. ‘Is there any way of speeding things along?’

‘We’ve put it down as an urgent request,’ they reply. ‘The doctor should look at it this afternoon. If you check back with us then, as late as you can, it might be ready for you. But it might be tomorrow.’

‘OK,’ my voice says. ‘Thank you.’

‘Goodbye,’ someone says.

‘Goodbye,’ someone replies.

The sky unleashes another downpour of rain, fiercer than before. There is no pitter patter: it is an onslaught against the windows, lines of water straining down the glass. I think about the sheep, huddled together in the swampy field. I wonder if the farmer will bring them inside, into the barn. I wonder if the farmer will see the horseshoe outline, and what they’ll do, what they’ll think, what they’ll remember.

I imagine a pale horse on the other side of the window. There are broad freckles of muddy brown across its nose and across its eyes, patchy and non-uniform. Its white mane is pressed by the rain on the left side of its neck. The breath from its nostrils fades gently against the glass. Grey eyes watch me. Reflect the shape of me in the curve of its eyes.

I imagine it trotting away, unsteady on its feet.

Searching for its missing horseshoe.

Searching for something lost.

Searching for something passed.