The Pill

It’s small and white.

Beautiful with its purple stripe on the left and complimentary hint of green on the opposite side.

The white capsule that will forever change the course of my life and the function of my brain; the pill that both terrified me and made me yearn for the future and everything I had hoped to become. The first time I filled my mouth with water before a literal mind-altering experience, I was petrified. A deer in the headlights of my parent’s gazes.

Sitting at the dinner table, my step mother saying how they had “thought through the decision and came to the conclusion that they are okay with this form of treatment.” Naturally I was to blindly agree with everything they had to say about me and what goes down my throat. (Said sarcastically)

The dainty light capsule that when it reached my stomach, dispersed and went straight to my brain- the cerebrum that controlled every aspect of me and who I had learned to both hate and love the past sixteen years of my life.

For any of you that have experienced the same kind of piercing pain that shoots through your body and every vein and soma and axon creating every single nerve cell in your body when the person that damned you to years of unspoken pain and suffering tells you that the only solution to the problem is more of them, I apologize.

The thing I both hated and loved the most was sitting in front of me. Our only resemblance between myself and the person inside of whom I was created was jaw line and hair color. The being that sent me into the wicked downfall that ended up consuming all of my thoughts and almost taking my last living breath was there, in-between bites of sushi, saying that the only person I should’ve talked to about how I was feeling was her and only her.

The same woman that when I was 13 I told I thought I had problems with starving myself simply looked down upon me and scoffed in that damn hypocritical laugh that I just can’t get out of my head, that now all of a sudden would be my “eternal and alleged” cure for the darkness in my brain that I couldn’t get out.  

The woman that created me to be who I am today: I can’t look in the mirror without wanting to cry. I can’t take a shower without being reminded of thanksgiving my sophomore year of high school, sitting alone and infuriated on my bed after the greatest crack in my sanity entire life. The exacto-knife that I thought would release me from the bars I was trapped behind and make me feel something-anything at all.

These precise, faint red lines on my thigh would forever remind me of that day and how I ran out of the house with tears streaming down my cheeks into my father’s ford expedition, trying to explain my emotional experience to a very logical person. “You don’t understand, you’re the one overreacting.”

 Then weeks later on Christmas day when the nearest thing I could find to do the trick was a pair of scissors to cut off the rubber tip of the nearest bobby pin since I couldn’t bear mark my own pale skin with something as deep as a cut from a razor.

 The bobby pin I inevitably chose was almost as bent and broken and twisted and sprung as I was that day. The sweet scarring gashes persisted and were visible under the spandex I wore running; the one thing I believed would shake me out of my funk could only remind me of the treacherous days that changed how I saw myself for years to come.

This new, magical pill won’t be able to fill in the skin from where the rusty, barren edges of the bobby pin had carved little linear shapes on my thighs, but I hope it will help me feel better about myself. The pill won’t replace my abusive mother, I know that. But I hope it will give me words to say to her. I hope, little white pill, I hope.