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Friday, July 2nd, 2010
What you love about pills is how small they are, how much energy is in them, like they’re atoms with electrons zinging around inside. You take a tiny white one, a pill so light you can hardly feel it on your tongue, that floats in the middle of a swallow of water and shoots down your throat like a barrel down Niagara Falls. Half an hour later you’re flying. You’ve left your body on earth, a million miles below, and you’re a comet flaming through the blue and green neon of a club, moving through the gyrating bodies scattering chunks of ice behind you, the music expanding and contracting in your skull, and there's no need to think anymore about being pregnant with a baby you can never have because what kind of life would it have, anyway, with a mother like you, a fuck-up who got suspended from college after midterms and now has to live at home, who has no job, who is required to go to therapy as a condition of lifting your suspension but fuck that shit: no one is going to mess with
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your head. Mirrorball. Lights swarm across the walls like glowy sperm, circling. A drink in your hand, the glass all glowy too, the liquor a kind of radium that lights up your veins. You can see the veins in your ex-boyfriend's arms, veins in the leaves of trees when you walk outside, though you’re not sure how you got there, out in some dark park, and you can hear the sap when you put your ear against a thick trunk and it’s sad, so sad, because the tree is telling you it wants to be back in the forest with its brothers and sisters. The world is such a messed up place. A spider is sitting
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on your head, reeling out tough white sticky threads that wrap your brain in a gauzy paralysis, and your mom,
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your mom was yelling at you about how she worked her ass off to pay for your education and all you did was party and collect Incompletes in all your classes and You never finish anything, and How could you sleep with your professor and What in God's name is wrong with you, You don't make any sense anymore when you talk, and Mom there are seven levels and I'm trying to find my way out of the expanding circles and he was an Achieved Being or that's what I thought but I'm sorry I'll look for a job; You're damn right you will, and I better not catch you drinking and How are we going to afford therapy and Sorry Mom Sorry and throwing up in the mornings in the bathroom down the hall quietly so she won't hear and your ex-boyfriend from high school is taking you to a clinic this week and you still have to figure out where you're going to get the money for what they called the procedure, no one said KILLING THE BABY but that's the phrase that keeps going through your head and just when
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you’re sobbing on the ground with your arms around the sad defeated tree, the tree that understands you more than anyone ever has or will, there’s another pill, a blue one, and you curl up among the roots that are breaking through the grass. Your limbs are heavy as tree roots. Your ex-boyfriend passes you a beer and you kind of miss the lip of the bottle and it pours down your face and his tongue follows where it spilled, and then he’s warm on top of you and inside you in the beautiful park where the trees mutter and you don’t care if they watch or not and everything is all right again as long as you feel him holding you down, his breath in your ear, someone you used to know but now you don't know him. He's a stranger. But so what because, because,
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