sneaked (!)

(Waterhouse, Mariana in the South)

A preview of my thesis-writing. Still not working as much as I should, but I am writing, and reading, reading. The following comes from a section about the Institution, post-diagnosis. Unsure of the tense. Unsure of the voice, but, there's something there there:

I never understood drugs – which is to say I’ve never taken them – but that was all before close quarters and after learning of several plastic-bags’ worth of secret vomit. Before, I cringed to think of needles mapping-up veins, hands, elbows, feet; I imagined bottles and tin cans distending a multitude of stomachs, miles of bloodways clogged with ether and dust. Detox, I’m discovering, never knows difference, doesn’t care for it. I watch many of us shake during communal daydreams. My hatred and misunderstanding give way to pity, then shame. Our collective sickness stops up my nose and solders my esophagus at the mouth-end. Constant and willed self-conditioning delivers and keeps us here, biology finally asserting itself over our scheming minds, and all of us, the addicts, liars, cutters, bingers, purgers, restricters, depressives, insomniacs, over-exercisers, children, girls, old women – all of us then suffer bodily and beyond any sense of will or direction. We have been wrong. Mind is matter; control provokes atrophy. Duped by consciousness.

Do tell me. You know...what you think.