Take the Pills

No.353 in 'A Story a Day for a Year'.

TAKE THE PILLS

I’m sitting here, in my favourite chair, and all about me it is quiet and still. If I hold my breath, holding it lightly so that nothing moves, then it is as though I don’t exist anymore. And I hold it like that for the longest time, till I think time has no meaning, but then the babble of my thoughts betrays me and too soon I must breathe and I snatch for breath and I cough because it catches in my throat, in my chest.

A window is open somewhere, I think. I can feel the air chill and creeping. I do not recall leaving a window open. Maybe it is in the bathroom. I can hear the sound of cars out on the street and somewhere someone is shouting though I cannot make out the words. I am alone and everything feels far off. I should take my pills, but I don’t.

‘I can’t be always reminding you,’ she says. She is no one. She is a voice in my head and once she had a name and an existence. I try to remember, feeling for her name, feeling for her, trying to recall just something about her. The smell of her hair or the taste of her neck or the touch of her. I try to make her real again, sensing the weight of her leaning against me, and then me reaching for her breasts or her hips or her arms or any part of her. But memory fails me completely and she is just a voice and it is even my own voice.

I should take my pills. It would be different then. I should get up out of my chair and walk the seventeen steps to my bathroom. I know it is seventeen because I have done it before and I have counted them - fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. And there’s a cabinet on the wall above the sink and the door of the cabinet is a mirror and my pills are behind that mirror. That’s why I stay in the chair, my favourite chair, and it smells of me and holds the shape of me when I am not in it.

Seventeen steps and meeting myself in the mirror and I don’t recognize who I am, except that there’s something. In the stranger's eyes, if I dare to look into the eyes. Something there but far off. Like I am losing me.

‘Take the pills,’ she says. ‘It will all be different if you take the pills.’

And it’s easy for her to say. She doesn’t see herself old now and everything sagging and slumped. She doesn’t see that, because she is just a voice in my head and a soft voice, softer than a whisper even when her voice crackles like the sound of a crow calling. Soft as a whisper because only I hear it.

Then for a moment, just the briefest, I feel the weight of something in my hand, like I am holding her, a part of her, warm and giving. And her nipple a small stub of roughness in my palm. But when I look my hand is empty and it is lost again. And I am alone as before, or more alone if that's possible, and the air is cold on my neck from the open window somewhere.

‘Take your pills,’ I say, out loud and in my own voice, and saying it like that I am even more alone. I can hear the words hitting against the walls, like a bird when it is trapped inside, a pigeon that has stepped in through the bathroom window maybe, curious, and now it is lost in the house, and it can’t find a way out so it flies into the walls, as if it believes walls can be surprised and just maybe there is a way through somewhere.

But there is no way out. There is no way out and it breaks its feathers, breaks its wings, and falls limply and heavily to the floor where it sits in its own shit, panting and wide-eyed and still, waiting for something.

And I don’t take the pills, I don't, and I sit in my favourite chair and it doesn’t feel like sitting, feels like nothing if I close my eyes, and I wait, but I don't know what it is I am waiting for. And I am listening, with my eyes closed and my head on one side, listening for the broken-winged bird’s last breath or for mine.