The Pretty Pink Pill

I lean my forehead against the cool exterior of the fridge door.

At around 5 AM, I tore my blanket off the bed, after deciding that the inevitable, insomniacious, dance in the sheets was not worth the panic that comes to me in the dark. I stacked my flimsy, old pillows against the wall in my kitchen - my stringent kitchen - and plugged in my lamp, the one that glows a unique kind of gold.

It illuminates the dish towel hanging on the stove, the one that's due for a wash.

Here I sit now, on the winter blanket I took with me to the town with no winter, windows closed, and blinds shut.

This past week, I triple checked to make sure the door was locked because of the heinous events that took place outside the local pub in my neighborhood. Something drug related.

I study the burner dials on my stove as I think about what it's been like living on my own in this town.

This morning I take a sip out of the whiskey bottle in my freezer, and I start to feel thankful for my inability to accept change. I sit in the familiar daze of sleep deprivation, and think about what it might feel like to have doors in this apartment.

My bathroom, kitchen and bedroom are all connected through doorless doorways, and I've gotten used to the walk between each room.

Only on the good days, this apartment feels big enough.

I want a cigarette but the sun hasn't risen yet, and the benches outside my building are not fenced in.

In other words, I am not safe enough yet. Though I crave the early morning sand in between my toes, I am not safe until I can be seen. I'm hardly safe enough to make breakfast.

Another sip. I notice how disordered my shoe rack has become. I haven't been bothered, the past 52 days, to be patient after locking the front door behind me. I must have been in a rush.

I have not stopped thinking about the last pill sitting in my kitchen drawer, and I refuse to acknowledge the mere fact that the thought of it has kept me awake when I should be sleeping.

The drawer I use to store my cutlery, my saran wrap, my vitamins, some stationary-middle school tape, a tape measure, two pairs of wooden chopsticks, the japanese paring knife I accidentally laid against the stove burner while it was still hot, the last pill, an empty box that once held tin foil, an untouched printout of my resume, the last pill, a small packet of McDonalds ketchup, the last pill.

Another sip, hoping it will suffice. I continue not to acknowledge the memories of the second to last pill I had yesterday.

I live in a town called HuntsVille.

Some kind of surreal community plucked out of thin air, New Desert, outsiders call it.

I guess my fate was inevitable here.

I might be the only person to live alone in this town. I wouldn’t know. A year ago I thought this town might have been a cult. Now I know better. Now I realize it wasn't a choice they had. Now I realize it was the kind of choice I was given with only one path out.

The fogginess that the eyes of the people here have in common, stunned me enough to rent out my own place, and keep far away from the inhabitants of this strange town for the entirety of last year.

Then I met Damien. The old man who no longer sits outside of Huntsville Local Grocery.

Maybe he's a ghost.

Sometimes I think I made him up.

He was the first person I had met that had a humanly crack in his voice, and in his eyes.

He was the only person I had talked to in a year, and he asked me questions instead of answering mine.

The pill taunting me in my kitchen drawer is the only proof I have of his existence.

Ironically, and simultaneously being the only proof that I might actually be crazy. His existence, a drug induced hallucination inspired by my withdrawal.

He asked me for some change the day I met him, and being the person who was hidden away for an entire year, I was experiencing an ill craving for words, conversation, normality. The wizened crinkle to his eyes and the feebleness to his bones, comforted me.

Every day, I began to visit him. We would watch the glazed faces of the shoppers who floated by us, like ghosts, and we would quietly snicker, like it was our own private joke. The only proof of our supposed sanity that we held onto together.

And then one day, the strange, perfect obstacles of the day toppled like dominos, into a perfect path leading back to him, to his hand that offered me a pretty pink pill.

And I took it, if only because he was still breathing, and blinking, and acting more human than anyone I had ever met in this dusty, deserted town.

53 pills.

Each time I swallowed, the architecture disintegrated around me. The strangeness of his being would dissolve, along with the ghostly bodies around us. It would become just me, a world of sand, a world of my own.

It was impossible to tell how long the trip lasted, and impossible to remember where I went. But I would always end up back home, in my bed, restless, and searching for the bottle.

52 days later, I forget what it feels like. The memory dissipates off of my skin the moment I wake from the daze.

And here I sit, the last pill in my kitchen drawer taunting me.

I went back everyday, to Huntsville Local Grocery, hoping to find him, only to find the strange absence of him.

I went back everyday, but he was as dead as the eyes soaring through me.

It's no longer safe for me to leave my stringent kitchen before sunrise, because of my inability to accept change.

I am no longer safe enough to make breakfast because my appetite died with Damien.

My stomach turns, because I'm drinking whiskey on an empty stomach at 5 AM.

My stomach turns because I've finished the bottle and it isn't sufficing, and I know what comes next, but I dont acknowledge it.

The sun rises, my stomach turns and my chest aches after my second cigarette.

I know what comes next.

I double check the door is locked behind me when I return to the quiet floor bed in my kitchen.

I rest my head against the cool refrigerator.

What comes next comes next.

I inevitably snatch the last pretty pink pill from my kitchen drawer.

The drawer where I keep my melatonin that I never take anyway.

I tiptoe down the creaky old steps of my building, and make my way, one last time, to Huntsville Local Grocery, to the same conclusion I am forced to accept.

I place the last pill onto my tongue, and I admire the desert before me as the rest of the world crumbles around me.

The song begins like a haunting deja vu.

My soul forgets it until the pill digests, and then it begins.

I sing along to the whisper, I sway into the vastness.

I sing,

“The sky was always the same shade of pink, illuminating the sun as it glows.

Drenched in the warmth of the desert ahead, the prickle between my toes.

Lifted off the ground like a bird against the breeze, free like open windows.

There I was, like the very first time, there I began to descend.

Engulfed in the desert’s parched silence, I was nothing but another grain of sand in the wind.”