Homemade Mocha

There's a feeling I get often. It's a very difficult to describe feeling, but I'll try, nonetheless.

Sometimes I feel like when the weather shifts, clouds form, the sun is blotted out, the pressure lowers, and the winds start blowing haphazardly. In the circumstance described, it easily becomes natural chaos, something I've always loved and felt was like home. My migraines, when I was younger, could be cured by strong winds blowing into my face. It was like the stronger the wind, the more able it was to blow the migraine away. It purified my soul at the same time.

Now, the feeling I want to describe is what you feel right before a storm, when everything is still dry, the air is relatively still, and you suddenly smell the oncoming storm. It's a magical and wondrous moment. You feel it in your whole body, in your mind, with every sense at your disposal. That atmospheric low isn't an unpleasant pressure, but it's still noticeable. It actually feels like a lifting of a burden from your body and your soul. There's always a sort of stillness at this moment - a tranquility that doesn't come often enough in most people's lives.

When I was psychotic - having constant, stable visual and auditory hallucinations - I invented a place in my mind that I could escape to. I always described it as a very bland, grey glade, completely surrounded by a treeline. The glade was quite large, probably the size of a football field. There were absolutely no other living creatures around except for some birds in the distant trees. The sky was cloudy and grey, but there was never any rain. The pressure was low - very low - and winds from all directions blew directly at, and converged on, me. I would just stand there and stand there in my mind, letting the winds blow at me as hard as they could and take away all of the stress, all of the worries, all of the voices, all of negative emotions... strip me of everything that clung to me and tried to drag me under, so that all that was left was simplicity and bliss.

Ever since I got on meds, and my psychoses were eventually completely blocked out, I couldn't access this place. I remembered it, but I couldn't access it. While, in my mind, that place had expanded into a vast, unsettled, unknown, untamed world, I always went to the field - that place that started it all - when I was under stress. Now, all of that was taken away. While I certainly wasn't in a good place - hit some of my lowest lows - the only real difference now is that my mind doesn't provide me with company and an escape. I don't have my coping mechanism for the still-recurring depressions and hypo-mania highs. I'm all alone with only a memory of escape.

I'm too afraid to go out into the world, anymore. I watch the storms from behind a window, never going out and enjoying them. The rain that I would once bask in, I simply watch from behind a pane of glass for a little while before going and either pouring media into my eyes or diddle-dawdling on the computer. I may be virtually 'stable,' but I'm lifeless. I may not be quite as risky as I once was, seeking some sort of destruction (not much in the conventional sense of sex and drugs), I may not plummet into as deep of depressions or as hopped up of manias, I may not see things that aren't really there or hear things that aren't really sounded, but that doesn't make me 'healthy' or 'fixed.' No, no, I'm quite far from that.

So, when I get that rare taste of the holiest of lands that I could've ever conjured up in my mind and my soul, where the pressure changed, my burden lifted, and my soul purified, I am in utter ecstasy. I feel all the same feelings I get from my prescription narcotics, only without the backlash. It's pure and wonderful. My brain becomes excited and sedated at the same time, euphoric and dreamy. My body begins to relax and my stresses start to melt away. My breathing becomes smoother and easier, as if each breath is of the cleanest, purest air my lungs would ever taste. For just a short time, I'm 'fixed,' I'm 'healed.' I feel healthy and at peace. For that brief time, I'm no longer afraid of or worried about anything.

So, when at 4:30 in the morning I make a fresh pot of coffee and pour that into a mug of hot chocolate powder, and make myself a homemade mocha, and suddenly I'm entranced and brought back to that magical realm, I don't care to worry about the past, present, or future. I don't care to think of all the things that stress me out in life, or all the things I'm afraid of. I don't worry about expectations or failures, of what I 'need' to do with my life, or what others say about me. For those brief thirty minutes that I drink two mug-fulls of homemade mocha, I detach myself from everything and just feel happy. I cut the strings that are tied all around me, holding me down. My soul departs from my body and rises up into the air in a surreal out-of-body experience. I reach a new level of sentience, of awareness, devoid of all the strife and distractions of life. I'm focused and clear.

There's a ritual there. The process is almost spiritual. The scent of the coffee always arouses a sort of wondrousness in my mind. And the gurgling sound of the percolation lulls me into a calm. Then I pour the coffee into a carefully selected mug (using another ritual entirely) and add whatever I wish to add. I then just let the coffee sit there, the aroma floating up into my nostrils, soothing me, as I wait for it to cool down. And then, when it's hot - but not too hot - I slowly begin to sip and savor it. I can feel it pour down my throat and into my chest, warming up my insides. It's a whole-body process. My central nervous system, my brain, my organs, my everything feels the effects of the coffee coursing through me.

While I could go on forever about this, it seems, I'll try to come to a closing. Ever since my mind became less active, less wild, I've searched and searched for replacements of those wonderful things that got me through those horrid times. Those moments of ecstasy and euphoria were forever trapped in my memory - whether conscious or subconscious - for me to seemingly eternally quest to find. I often wonder if those things ever could truly be replaced or if my attempts to find them will always be futile. I can manage to capture those moments very, very briefly - such as with the homemade mocha - but I can never seem to hold on to them. They're drugs that I constantly need to find a new fix of, whereas the original psychotic infatuations were pure and drawn from the spring - the very source - that was infinitely flowing. When my body and mind deemed it necessary, I would always fall back into that realm of total peace amidst all the chaos. Now, I live for those moments, each and every one I can find.