Little Bottles (Alice, Annotated #4)
Thirteen years of little bottles
lined up like answers.
Swallow this. Wait six weeks.
Tell me whether the room has changed
or only the girl inside it.
At first the instructions were gentle.
A tablet with breakfast.
Another before bed.
Every label promising balance
in language too small for consequence.
Then came the transformations.
Weight gathered where I did not ask for it.
Hair abandoned the brush in handfuls.
Some pills made death louder.
Others taught my blood how to race.
One made me brighter than was safe.
One emptied the color from everything.
One put me to sleep.
One made sleep impossible.
Still, another bottle appeared.
Paxil. Prozac. Effexor.
Wellbutrin. Lexapro. Cymbalta.
Lamictal. Topamax. Ritalin. Vyvanse.
Names collecting on the shelf
like failed spells in identical glass.
By then the medicine had grown teeth.
Xanax. Adderall. Gabapentin.
Stronger answers for questions
no one seemed interested
in asking correctly.
The Caterpillar sits across from me,
smoke curling between us.
Who are you?
I answer with symptoms, history, side effects.
They answer with another prescription.
Eventually Xanax stopped calming anything.
It bent back on itself,
made the panic stranger, the nights narrower.
I could not sleep without the thing
that had begun teaching me not to sleep.
And somehow the person who helped me stop
was not the person holding the prescription pad.
When I was told it would be preferable
to hurt myself once than keep speaking
to someone deemed harmful,
because at least that would be a singular act,
I understood exactly how far the rabbit hole went.
Apparently it has clinicians too.
People who can call catastrophe
a treatment plan
if it fits neatly enough
inside the chart.
I came home for Ketamine,
another door glowing at the end of the hall.
They told me my body was too unstable,
that the hunger had made me unsafe,
when Lyme was already moving through my blood.
Again, I knew something was wrong.
Again, someone else named it for me.
Again, the bottle came before belief,
the diagnosis after damage,
the explanation somewhere behind both.
There are mushrooms in Wonderland
that make one side larger,
the other side small.
The Caterpillar never says
which piece will leave you yourself.
That has always been the wager.
Take this. Stop that. Increase. Taper.
Become easier to live inside.
Become someone the chart recognizes.
Become anything but difficult.
Thirteen years later,
the shelf is crowded with old instructions.
I am still here beneath them,
while the Caterpillar keeps asking, who are you?
as though no one has been listening to the answer.