You know what happens to a candle when you find out it's counterfeit wax as in there's a birthday candle rolled in super-cheap wax. The middle burns down and the rest doesn't budge and eventually it smoothers itself because the melted wax has nowhere to go and so it eats the flame?
That's me on drugs.
And I can't do it. I can't write. I can't sing. I can't paint. I can't settle enough to read a book or kayak. I just float around like a shell, a breathing ghost. The cheap wax on the outside. Have you seen the past few weeks? Paralyzed by stationery, indifferent to ghosts and the living alike? It's almost better to feel everything than nothing. It's better to suffer for this art of a life, it's better to not be immune, untouchable and hard. A jar of hearts won't help me like this. Lochlan hates it but feels desperate. Caleb can just buy better. PJ can't even be in the same room with me, he says it's a stranger, but he doesn't say that to me directly, just to them. Ben tells me to shhhh, that it's necessary to stabilize everything and then maybe we can see about trying tiny changes but to leave it for now because they can't have me standing on the edge of a proverbial, figurative cliff 24/7, that they are tired.
That they worry.
That they can't control the ghost without the pills.
It makes me laugh.
Jacob is not a ghost. He's real and it's my dreams trying to clue me in. It's my intuition, feeling him near. It's some magnificent attempt to drive Lochlan away for good to pay him back for being a scared teenager. It's a wish for a do-over and had Jacob even come near me I would have shouted for him to stop, shielding my eyes, hand up as if I could physically keep him away.
If I could go back I would and I never would have met him and Caleb can't BUY that but oh what if he could, instead of golden rings and glass houses and other mens' loyalties?
Thanks to my metabolism for medications this casual, chemical lobotomy isn't going to be enough. My brain is four minutes into Everglow, my brain is down the block screaming so loud you can't even hear it from here. My fingers are back to fluttering and I am not at peace right now, I don't care what your eyes are telling you.
I look at Sam, sitting at the table writing sermons in his field notebook, his favourite stubby little Kaweco pen glowing warm from overuse and I want to scream in his face but I haven't come back from down the block yet.
I need my outlets-
Right now you need peace of mind, he says gently.
Lochlan nods. It will all come back.
And in the meantime?
Bounce off the walls, Peanut. I'll catch you.