Duloxetine, 20mg
RAIA SMALL
Four hundred goats came to the hillside near my house to eat the grass before it could burn, and the walk to visit them each day became my pilgrimage. Their gentle faces, their constant chewing. They climbed on top of each other to reach delicious scraps of bark. They rested together, laying on their stomachs, huddled. One day on the path I asked a regular walker,
“Where are the goats today?”
“Oh,” she said, “The goats are gone. They took them away last night.”
All that was left were the chewed-down grass stalks, pellets of shit, and a gamey smell on the land. A week later, dry lightning struck at the grasslands and forests, and fires bloomed like blood bruises across the skin of the state.
“Where are the goats today?”
“Oh,” she said, “The goats are gone. They took them away last night.”
All that was left were the chewed-down grass stalks, pellets of shit, and a gamey smell on the land. A week later, dry lightning struck at the grasslands and forests, and fires bloomed like blood bruises across the skin of the state.
Before the pandemic, I imagined that the metal pieces at the core of my chest could be melted down with a certain kind of touch. Afterwards, there was no contact, just quiet walks where strangers moved off the path to let me pass at a safe distance. I started noticing birds—robins and crows and blue jays and herons and egrets—as people retreated into their houses, behind doors and screens. The metal pieces hardened and joined with the bones and muscles scaffolding my body, patiently waiting to melt like the ice in my glass.
My friend gave me a tomato starter from their garden the first week of July. We sat out there for hours while their adopted stray cats wandered through and the sun beat down on our heads and thighs. I took the plant home, eager to grow something with my own hands. I replanted it, forgot to water it, then remembered. It grew large before the leaves started to dry, brown, and curl. The same two green, unripe tomatoes have lived on it since summer, and now it’s Halloween.
Stacey died and for three days I felt her presence flooding out of her body, through the breeze and the birdcalls, in the bright pink azaleas and purple jacarandas, in the sweetness of ice cream or the bitterness of iced coffee. Then I turned a page and was back at work, on videocalls all day while my eyes combed through Twitter, catching on the death tolls, the people killed by police, the disconnected chatter of the anonymous horde. I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to work, to make meals and take showers, to make phone calls and hold meetings, but the real loss was not that I couldn’t function, but that I could and did.
One Wednesday in July, I woke up with a knot in my neck, like my spine was a bike chain with a kink in it, and after a few days, it hadn’t gotten better. That weekend I moved out of my apartment, packing all my books, dishes, dry goods, and clothing into boxes, and carrying them up the stairs from my garden-level room one floor below the basement. I pushed the seats down in my station wagon and filled it on my own. Before I left, I bowed to each corner of the room, thanking the land and the roof beams for sheltering me for those 18 months. When I got to my mother’s house my neck ached fiercely and I laid down to rest. Three hours later, I couldn’t move without shrieking in pain. I spasmed so tightly that it felt like an axe was hacking into my bones while a fire burned through my muscles. I lay awake all night in pain, took an expired Vicodin at midnight, and tried to prepare for what felt like my death.
I thought it would kill me to not be touched for 7, 8, 9, then 10 months, but it did not. I thought it would kill me when my best friend died in the hospital and I couldn’t visit or call, but it did not. I thought it would kill me to be in the kind of pain that made me think about taking the whole bottle of Vicodin in protest of its failure to dull anything. The scarier truth is that what should be fatal isn’t. My body continued while pieces of myself atrophied and dropped like dead leaves.
Ever since my back started hurting—suddenly, constantly—my bones feel different. I feel the vertebrae thickened in my neck, one larger than the rest and sticking out, a hard ridge beneath the skin. Ever since I began the medication it takes me 30 minutes to come, and sometimes it feels like hearing someone else have an orgasm in the next room. There’s a chartable distance where there used to be none, or something infinite.
I pull out songs I loved at 18, hoping they will cut through the haze and make me weep through the layers of skin, but they just run over like rain on asphalt. The landscape is less porous, more prone to flooding, now that it’s a city and not a pasture. Lacan said the real is that which we’re always returning to. I keep returning here, but each time it wears away a piece of me.
I think of my body like the city I grew up in, constantly being built up, constantly being destroyed. I can be nostalgic for those few years in the 1990s when it was contiguous with my body—when the place shaped me into the version of myself that somehow rings real.
I’m living through a slow genocide that’s picked up a lot of speed and all I can do is send $100 to my friend in prison, go for a walk with Springsteen blasting in my headphones, knit words into chains. I didn’t want to be alone for the collapse, but it’s what we don’t want that finds us, in the place we thought we could stay hidden.
When the air finally cooled in the second week of November, a quiet joy spread like a fire from my chest to my limbs. It was cold enough to wear three layers. I saw my breath above my mask. My high school best friend and I hiked through Tilden Park, in scattered rain showers beneath dead leaves and a storm-gray sky. The new medication was leaving my blood according to its half-life downward exponential curve. My body returned to its equilibrium, yet was changed. I kept the windows up and let my fingers be warmed against the wheel.
After 9 months of hiding while politicians sacrificed us by the hundreds of thousands on the altars of industry during blistering heat, the weather changed. The smoke cleared. I unpacked my emergency backpack (muscle relaxers, t-shirts, toothbrush, one book of poetry), hopefully for longer this time.
I wanted to speed through this atrocity and forget it ever happened. I wanted to slow time to a stop after Stacey’s death so I could join her in stillness, never moving or eating another meal or menstruating or aging again. I wanted to crack time like a glass globe and harness the hidden substance inside and live on it like an ether beyond life and death.
The rain came finally in a torrent, washing the ash from my car, leaving the Eucalyptus leaves dripping. The waterfall waxed and flowed, the stream pooled more deeply, wet branches arced above the stone trail. I asked what it meant to survive something, not sure I wanted to know. The Earth moved before I could invent an answer.