They were raging again.
It was the first day back from my little “stunt,” as they put it, my night away in the dirty house half spent sleeping stock-still under a wobbly ceiling fan and half spent watching Wonder Woman through tear-smudged glasses on a dying laptop in a McDonald’s parking lot at 4am.
My “stunt” was nothing of the sort. It was not impressive or deliberate or cowardly or brave. It did not require a Hollywood stand-in (although I would have gladly welcomed one). It was a reflexive act, sort of like gagging or gasping for air.
They had not stopped raging, so I walked out into the afternoon and turned my head up to the sky.
The rain had stopped finally. It had dumped buckets for days, but the ground was thirsty, so the grass was merely dewy and baked warm since lunchtime. I walked onto it in my bare feet and flexed my toes.
I have a porch I never enjoy and a tree I never look at, and it’s the latter I was drawn to as the yelling behind me increased with every step I took onto the soft grass. It was a little after five, and I had dutifully made and eaten dinner despite not wanting it and had taken my pill as prescribed.
I am on medication. Two anti-depressants, an anti-psychotic, and a benzo that doesn’t work as well as it used to but is better than nothing. I have a couple of diagnosis codes to satisfy my insurance company. I have more problems than line items.
When I meet people who resist medication for mental illness, I know where they are coming from. I have been there too. But I have also been so depressed that I literally did not care what I took or what it did to me if there was any chance that it made me feel unlike the way I felt; not too long ago I was there. So, medicine it is. My depression is “resistant to treatment,” according to my psychiatrist. Even my mental illnesses have to be extra.
I was dubious at first. Fearful of an anti-psychotic. Will my cognitive functions be affected? Will I still be myself? Then I realized I no longer knew what that meant. So I figured down the rabbit hole, Alice! Drink the potion! Eat the treat! Because honestly, what else are you going to do? You may just get lost and find yourself.
The more therapeutic the medicine became, the more I welcomed the chemical cocktail I took like clockwork everyday. Medication helps to dull the blows of the chaotic circumstances in both my personal and professional lives.
And on this particular day I had just taken my medication, and they were still raging, and the grass felt good in a way that I was unable to feel that particular type of good, and I welcomed it fully.
I lay down under the tree I never got to look at and looked up at clouds I barely knew were there.
The grass reached up to envelop my body in a cool embrace as my head fell back under the safe canopy of rustling leaves. Through the breaks, I stared up at heaven and felt free.
Gossamer clouds stretched over a pale blue canvas, and I imagined the grass, the sky, simultaneously rising and descending in invisible walls surrounding me so that when I closed my eyes and opened them again, I could no longer hear the shouting from within the house. All was silent. A peace swept over me, moving in time with a tuft of cloud gently passing across the sky.
It must have been left behind, I thought dreamily, thankful for the pharmaceutical calm, the blank landscape of my waking mind. I tracked the little cloud until it faded into anonymity, suddenly jealous of its ability to shape-shift or to simply disappear.
My eyes slipped closed and I dozed for awhile, until a slamming door shattered my peace. The sky, darkened now, and heavy footsteps.
…
Some people live in glass houses
that stand for a lifetime.
I build glass palaces
with high towers that last
only a little while.
There are no glass houses for some of us, only stones.