The Best American Essays 2015 by Ariel Levy Page A

then arrange those CDs; I do a crossword and read for a bit. And what a sense of virtue I have after I have held out like this, resisted jumping the gun, when I can hold that merest dot of a thing on the tongue for a moment before washing it down. I do love the feeling, once it’s taken, that the cavalry is on the way. Just knowing
that
is a pill’s worth of ease.
    And yes, as promised, there comes the moment when that craving edge drops away and the dull sense of the body fades. The body, I am suddenly aware, is fine. What I know is that I now have one especially good hour, a shiny hour, when I can park myself in comfort on the couch, blankets around my feet, warm light on just over my right shoulder. I can read, focus, or—better—write. My thoughts and words feel more synchronous; they have a capacity that they don’t necessarily always have for darting this way and that, taking little runs at things. I’m not sure how to describe it, this sense that the leash has gained some extra bit of elasticity, my slightly increased confidence that if I push this way or that way the phrases will be there.
    And so I write, I try to write. Which is to say I enter into yet another relation to time. The one that is finally the best, the most gratifying of all. For though I can have this special merged sense for short intervals when I read—or certainly did in the past, before so much distraction supervened—it is really only when I am putting thoughts and impulses into words, when I am attuned to whatever is just then the right rhythm of expression, the live cadence, that I feel all sense of lapsing time fall away. Except I don’t feel it fall away, it just
does.
It’s as if I have, for a moment, broken out of the shell of that constant awareness, am free to take a look around.
    This fine state does not last, of course. But it has not been
so
much of a change of state that it brings a crash after—nothing like that. Just a fading, an ebbing, the mind no longer quite so intent on muscling around. I feel the shift come in the language first—using words gets just that slight degree less pleasurable, and with that the first crack opens and the old sense of time comes leaking back in. Just that little bit, but it’s enough.
    The convalescence is not at all times solitary, of course. The long afternoon eventually ends, and Lynn comes home from work and brings the world in the door with her—a feeling of different activity, an agenda for cooking and eating, bits of news and stories from her day. That mood that was many moods, but also all just the self in a room for hours and hours, dissolves. Now there is talk. Music. I sit on a high stool in the kitchen and busy myself peeling carrots or dicing an onion. It is not an easy or immediate transition. The long afternoon is become all bright lights, radio music. Lynn gives her account, but she also asks for mine. Which can be vexing. I have to figure out how to translate what has been a long and largely unmarked procession of thoughts and fancies into a narrative that somehow signifies. How to create the context and make the bridge; how to bring across the rhythm and duration of all that sitting and looking? Yes,
duration
is the right word here. How do I bring some essence of that state over into what feels like a completely differently structured kind of time?
    In the presence of another—even if the other is in the next room and otherwise occupied—the reality of the solitude pulls away, just as in the heart of the solitude that other reality takes on a character of unlikeliness.
    Â 
    Finally, of course, there is the night. It has become unfamiliar and phantasmal during this period—and for this I blame the discomfort, the drugs, the new sleeping arrangement in our daughter’s old room. I can almost feel the different layers opening out one from the other, depending on the hour. Sleep, usually so ordinary, has become a kind