Pills

I’m sitting in your bathroom with a bottle of your pills. I fished them from your medicine cabinet. I didn’t read the bottle. It’s the only way I know how to get your attention. I am desperate to win you back from him. I don’t care if he’s smarter than me or better looking. I don’t care that he’s on-track to become our high school valedictorian. It doesn’t matter that he can discuss the finer points of Germany’s unification with your mom while I sit silently, thinking about Optimus Prime dunking on Megatron. I don’t even care that he’s your ex-boyfriend and you think your feelings have reawakened. I don’t give a shit about any of that. He can’t possibly love you like I do. No fucking way. That’s why I’m sitting on the windowsill in your bathroom, waiting for you to come in here to witness how much more I love you than he does. I probably won’t take them, but you need to see that my life isn’t worth living if you’re not with me.

 

soft amber streetlight

wash out most of the starlight

man’s constellations

 

I’m startled as you throw open the bathroom door. I search your eyes for any sign of warmth, fishing for any semblance of our summer of holding hands and making out; of dreamy I-love-you’s or nothing-can-come-between-us’. I find nothing but midnight frost in them. You demand the pills, and I give them to you, still mining your eyes for the heart that once beat for me. Those eyes I quested were examining the pill bottle like a scientist coldly working a math formula in her head. You deduce out-loud to no one in particular that no more than seven pills should kill an adult male. When you tossed the pills back to me, I barely had time to catch them before hearing the door close behind you. And I’m alone again with the pills.

 

crisp, windy twilight

litter twirls and loops the night

I watch it falling

 

I stand, facing the bathroom mirror, trying and failing to fully contemplate my insignificance, not just in your world, but within my own. I had never actually considered taking the pills at first, but the way you coolly dismissed me shook me; had me looking at our universe – and my place in it – differently. I stared at myself, wondering what a fish saw when staring up at its own reflection instead of the planets, stars, and galaxies I saw when I stared up at the night sky. I was a small, pointless fish in an infinite pond with a vial of pills.

 

Venus outshines man

piercing our light pollution

curved in crescent form

 

A fish’s perception of reality is bound. Unlike a fish, my view is unbound. But in that bathroom, I was a fish, crippled by my own vision, staring at myself, failing to see our future together when the future valedictorian would dump you for a second time, compelling you to crawl back to me, compelling me to gladly take you back due to my poor self-esteem, leading to our ill-advised marriage and our dysfunctional decade-long dance of codependence that would end with me refusing to heed your pleas to hold our sham together a moment longer, leading me to love, loss, and mending in the arms of others until I would finally meet a woman willing to sit with me and stare up at the night sky together in wonder.

Like a fish, I am limited by my reality and cannot see my future, but I also couldn’t see any future in those pills. I place the pills on the sink and walk out of your bathroom, past your indifferent eyes, out of your door, leaving you to call our future valedictorian. Leaving you to our past. Leaving you to our future.

 

vapor clouds forming

crystalizing my exhales

chill cuts through my bones

** *

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