Solpadol

By J.W. Carey

Solpadol is a story about self-destruction, drug dependency and unrequieted love.

Taking place over the course of a single day, Carey returns to his Broken Polemic series with another semi-confessional, semi-fictional piece of work that works to blur the lines between fiction and reality. This time, love is the overwhelming theme of the narrative, with much of the day revolving around a single conversation between the unnamed protagonist and the woman he used to love.

Solpadol is a real look at the aftermath of unrequieted love, and the damage it can leave on a person's soul.

• Language: English
• Publisher: J.W. Carey
• Release date: May 9, 2016
• ISBN: 9781311279378

J.W. Carey

I've lived in the North-West of England my entire life, and in 23 years I haven't managed to achieve a single thing. I write these things because it lets me feel like I've achieved something, and it lets me tell myself that I am something beyond that which I am in my daily life.

Book preview

Solpadol

Solpadol

J.W. Carey

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2016 J.W. Carey

Cover by J.W. Carey

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Solpadol

J.W. Carey

Content:

Solpadol

- Me

- Henry Miller

- Ernest Hemmingway

- Billy Pettinger

- Grace Petrie

- Allen Ginsberg

- George Orwell

- St. George

Honesty

Contact

Solpadol

A Broken Polemic III

By J.W. Carey

Maybe it’s time we talked about depression.

Maybe it’s time to cut away the metaphors, the narcissism, the intellectual realism exchanged for fact. To throw away the dreams of literature like yellow smoke between fingertips, take the ideology of consciousness and exchange its memory for the ghost of Guinness and imported sugar and painkillers for my dad’s back. Maybe it’s time we admitted to loving our suffering for the hope that it makes us wise, that it makes us strong – like regret and heartbreak and misery exercised our hearts until they became healthy.

Maybe it’s time I was honest about the full medication I hide and throw away, about the calcium supplements, the needles, the potential of health that I lock beneath my bed and wheeze out the black thirst of sugar and drink in the night. To admit the tightness around my eyes, the sudden shear of sensation that these things bring.

Maybe it’s time I said I wasn’t addicted, to anything, and that all choices for self-destruction are my own. Time I was honest and whispered the words instead of miming them. Maybe it’s time I told my heart that she doesn’t make me happy. That she doesn’t leave me satisfied. That our hour trysts are nothing compared to a pint and a pill and dry-heaving in the middle of a packed bar with an inch-high stage. That I feel all the colder because she is warm. That I have ran across the city of Manchester with her face in my hands, pulling on, driving me on, whipping me into the fear of the last train. That I have followed her ghost through the streets of Liverpool; through the three floors of the Krazyhouse and back to a top-floor flat that made my thighs pant. That I have sat beside the Salford river, beneath the sun and the pink leaves, and never wanted to see her again. That I have smoked with the statue of a black-iron miner overlooking Wigan Pier, and asked him what he thought of Orwell’s corpse across the water. That I have stood, in Hale, and been happy in the shadow of a lighthouse that shines no light. That I have fallen asleep, and woken beneath the Christmas lights of Southport. That I have sat in every bar in Wigan, every nightclub; that I have stared out of the window on Great George Street and seen the sky break apart into primary colours and tertiary and fall through the sieve of the monotone into the hip flash filled to the brim with poetry and Kraken. Maybe I need to learn how to use a backspace.

Maybe it’s time to picture her and feel nothing. To see her and hold her hand and know nothing. To not care how she feels and waste my life not hurting her. Maybe it’s time to recede into the honesty of abuse, the abuse of the body, the abuse of the blood cells that move like drunks in my veins, the abuse of the cracking retinas, the abuse of the nerve endings wrapped in damp towels, the abuse of the extensor indicis, the abuse of the shadow canine, the abuse of a rotten liver and a ghost pancreas.

Maybe. so many maybes. maybe nothing. maybe everything. maybe Solpadol.

‘I found my soul spinning at the bottom of a glass, drunk on oxygen, reeling with painkillers and smiling up at me like the grimace of the damned.’

Me

Beneath the shadow of the stage, I could barely tell what he was saying. He’d been talking for a long time, pulling on my sleeve when he wanted my attention, but I wasn’t paying attention. I felt nauseous, no vomit but all gas, all rotten smoke in my stomach. It was the product of too much booze – too many hours waiting, too many hours talking with bohemian drunks in my hometown; too many hours lying to old friends and telling them that they looked happy, happier with their girlfriends than ever before. I spent my free days like that – suspended between the sickly mornings, the liquid afternoons and the painkiller nights. Too many hours drinking and fighting the good fight.

He stunk of artificial smoke, puffed from a battered eCig that blinked at me with its blue eyes. The crowd jostled occasionally, but not much. There was a woman just to the left of us that wouldn’t stop dancing like she was at her daughter’s wedding, throwing her arms back in comic embarrassment and tossing her head from side to side. I could see the musician glance down at her occasionally, with a crooked eye like he was trying to stop himself from laughing.

He was good; he played the guitar well, knew how to work the crowd and broke off between songs to tell a couple of jokes from the road. He played a few songs I hadn’t heard before, and he stopped to ask us to cheer for his merch guy, who stepped onto the bar and waved his arms enthusiastically, forgetting that he was holding a plastic cup of beer in either hand. He spilled the booze down his shirt, across the bar and into the hair of a few people stood around him.

I was drinking with my pills, tossing the painkillers back with Jack and coke and, occasionally, I’d follow the steps down into the clogged bathroom and try to make myself throw up. My gag reflex was dead, and it could take minutes for my fingers to hit a nerve point, hanging in the middle of my throat like a hologram. They’d hit the trigger and I’d retch, dry-heave into the space above someone else’s shit and torn toilet paper and shredded love notes carved into the wooden wall.

I bought the singer a drink afterwards and told him that I loved a book he once wrote. He hugged me and I spent the rest of the night smiling, like it was carved into my face. I smiled as I threw up the noxious beer; smiled as we lounged in uncomfortable chairs off Lime Street and drank whiskey named after Irish punk bands; smiled as I followed the people I knew back to their top floor apartment; smiled as I lay on their coach and fell into a deep sleep.

The seagulls cry like a backspace. Their laughter, jubilant and maddening, clicks like black plastic and could’ve wiped a year, two years, a thousand years, away. The relentless hammering of their keys drag me into a sudden wakefulness.

Liverpool. drunk – still. The motions of sleeping men and women are a cocoon, and the air is warm with their shared breath. I know their names; all of them. My phone tells me it’s 6:27 and, outside, the darkness hangs heavy. I slept on a couch too small for me, and my left foot managed to hold me in place all night. An open skylight grimaces at me, and I can see the trailing fingertips of artificial light brush against the edges of the glass. Wisps; lost souls dazed, confused, caught beneath the prison of imported lightbulbs.

It’s like an act, something I’ve rehearsed a hundred times before. I move through the old motions like an