A little girl posed in a baby pink leotard wearing pearly white tights, glossy tap shoes, and birthday-cake-icing-thick stage makeup. “Remember how they would go click-clack so loud as you would practice around the house?” Mother tries to relate to me as she holds up the polaroid. Thoughts float through my skull, slow as snowflakes in Christmas-morning flurries. I forgot how to respond to a question like this. You ever stand in a grocery store line and try to be a normal person? It is so boring where we are, the only thing we have to do is look back. We are sitting on cheap sheets, crepe-thin pillows, and papier-mâché blankets as we wait for the doctor to approve me being discharged. We wait. We wait. I feel my brain melt and ooze out of my ears. In winters past, we might have frozen, but it’s already mid-summer now, and so many orange years later. The nurse finally hands me my paper bag of belongings and list of new prescriptions and waves goodbye slow as tree sap slipping down a car windshield. These days, thoughts don’t come quick. These days, meds make time turn slow. My soul: shattered and rearranged, I mourned the person who died inside of me when I lost my mind.
heartbreak and cigarettes 