As we arrived back at Sully and Ted's room all I could think about was the Grey. It had already started so there wasn't any option but to plow ahead full steam.

Nothing is worse than watching the Grey arrive. The Grey happens at the end of night and the beginning of morning. It's not a thing, it's a feeling – a pre-dawn depression for fiends. It does this "Hi There!" when you least expect it, and believe me, it is always a surprise.

So there you sit, downing your umpteenth beer – which doesn't do a thing for you but keep you busy, the coke has long since pulled the override switch on any effect of alcohol – and you're spinning, or maybe you're starting to wig a little, fiend a little. Maybe it's all gone, gone hours ago, and you're getting wiry, looking around with a thousand eyes and wondering what the fuck to do.

Then you see it.

Slowly, the sky becomes less black. Just a little at first, but enough to make you check your watch. There are no beams of dawn's early light or welcoming morning sunshine. No, before all that there's a sickly blanket of Grey. When you've been wired all night, or maybe for the past couple of nights, the Grey is that moment of truth – that reality check – when you realize how fucked up your life is.

You look at the Grey and realize that soon people will be waking up from a normal night's sleep, getting up and going to work, living a normal life in normal time. When you're a fiend time becomes just a collection of numbers that have no effect on who you are, what you do, or when you do it. You lose time. In a normal life you follow a certain schedule: when you get up, when you go to work, when you sleep. Those things are irrelevant when your grinding the shit out of your teeth at five in the morning.

That time is lost.