Back on the Yellow Brick Road

I've spent almost a week off of the tea (let's call it Oz, like the Wizard of Oz, my friends and I have decided this is good slang that we should propagate). The bottle is so hot, the contents like coffee grounds and animal piss heated together, at least I hope it'll keep the tears at bay. Our apartment is hot like an oven, or maybe it's my fever, R and I are both battling off a stomach virus for now. At first I vomited last Wednesday night, sitting on the toilet unsuspecting that I had guessed the wrong end and finding myself and floor of my parent's bathroom violently soiled. As with any illness at a parent's home, my mother and father  cleaned it up, ushering me off to bed with a washcloth and glass of water. It had caught me off guard, I felt bad but too sick to do anything more than fall into a instant, overheated sleep.

By now, I'm finally comfortable full of Oz, green, and Bentyl--a stomach medicine for the virus. I sink back into the futon and stare off at the TV. This whole week I've been having crying spells uncontrollably because of multiple changes to my daily antidepressants. My face shriveling and turning red, as loops of horrible thoughts go through my brain and my mouth spills out "I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry" between crying and hyperventilating. My only respite was sleep. Even my mother patting my head and comforting me or R holding me and reminding me it would be alright, nothing could quell my sense of hopeless despair.

Despair at who I am, who I could be, and the guilt of putting my family and boyfriend through this when we should be enjoying Thanksgiving and Chanukah. At least we lit the candles most of the nights, which made me happy with memories of childhood Channukah's spent at my grandparents' house with my great-grand parents there as well as my parents and my aunt. I was the only child, but in the darkness of that dining room I felt the magic of those glowing candles and the words sounded out in a language I have still never learned. It connects me to what feels like old world magic.

--------back to real life---------

The toilet just overflowed. Diarrhea and urine and bile and water spilling out across the fake marble towards us. R standing in the bathtub, attempting to break the clog with a metal stick, I imagined him a fisherman before B.C.E. in some fertile valley among reeds. I tried to stem the flow with towels and bath mats and paper towels, each of us with one glove on fighting off this battle of the black water. Our dance away from the streaming tides made me chuckle, like I hadn't chuckled in days.

Sometimes life is ridiculous.

-Lucy