* Mental health triggers, suicidal ideation*
God. You know, I’m just washing dishes, feeling useful and kind of self-satisfied. Haven’t dropped anything or cut myself, even though the bothersome cat is weaving around my legs. I swear- if he had a ball of yarn, I would have been a cocoon by now.
See, it’s the third week of withdrawal from a particularly nasty medication, and I’m thinking I have aced it. Not too bad, not too bad. There’s a cast iron frying pan with some baked-on crusty stuff, and so I run the water very hot and start leaning into it with the old scrub brush. I’m even thinking that this is good exercise, when the destined vapors rise up to me… the singular smell of fried mushrooms. [Me, at twelve, tagging along with Dad, picking them in fields and ditches, once getting chased by bulls] [Mom, frying them up in her iron pan, the whole house smelling delightful]
And, God dammit, I cry. I rattle dishes and run the water faster to help stifle it. And I think of missed things and squandered chances for love. And I let this self-pity pool into something worse, and I think what is the freaking point of trying to get clean and well? It’s not as if there are more memories to make, more chances to unsquander my wasted life.
And at last, to myself: “You’ve made a mistake, bud. Better go back to the upswing with those meds.” Because I see myself hanging from a tree like those men they found, and I take it to the logical conclusion of worrying about last testaments and burial arrangements. That’s what it does. That is what it does.
And so, tomorrow, we find out what we are made of.
