prescription personified

Is there a cure for addictive personality disorder? Should I know this given the letters B and A following my name on my business card? I remember limited and random things from my university days. Your peripheral vision is black and white. Nietzsche loved Wagner. Some creatures will mate with Beta males after they are already pregnant so that he will think it is his and show up with food. I should know if there is a cure, I would imagine it cognitive. I don’t know that I want to cure the intensity though. The way I zero in and indulge, grab hold like those odd sticky-hand gag-gifts you used to smack people with; covered in fur and dust. I cured myself of one, human form, recently. Not voluntarily sadly, but through fast blinking eyes and clenched jaw and fake half sentences of congratulation. Oh wow. Mmm yes. That’s great. For you. So that lanky demon in me is restless and looking for something else. Something delicious and odd with the capacity to break my heart so that I will not have to reframe my world-view.

Alissa: No seriously, I think I might actually be cursed.
Carole (gesturing to my surroundings and life with one hand) This is a curse?

Thought perhaps the over-the-counter friends would stave it off but it’s looking more like it will have to be human, or something in tablet form ending in Pam. The Pam family. Perhaps a human named Pam.

A 30-something girl sits in a dental surgery office wishing she had dressed better because the Dentist is young and cute with no wedding ring. Yet, she’s already 5 years ahead thinking about dishes flying across the kitchen, her accusing him of being square and him accusing her of not respecting the “square-ness” (he makes the quote gesture) that is paying for the roof over her head and the room on the third floor to write, read tarot and smoke joints out the window. No, it would never work. Why bother?

“Now, after the surgery I will give you a couple prescriptions and you can make the decision based on how you’re feeling.”

The girl thinks “Oh god, don’t flinch, don’t flinch, clench your jaw, NO, don’t clench your jaw, he knows jaws. Just relax your face. Relax your face.” The girl’s left eyebrow starts to spasm. This is what she’s been waiting for, giggling with the girls over, no eastern European babushka to lift a plastic bin from the cupboard above the fridge. Little plastic bottles for head and heart. Wartime habits die hard.

“Some people are ok with ibuprofen but most need the Tylenol 3s.”

She’s back at school now, hobbling on crutches with “the gout” (she does not make quote signs so as not to lose her balance). Apparently nightly drunkenness affects your kidney’s ability to function. So to ease the pain of this obviously addiction-related ailment they’ve given her a prescription of T3s and for the first time in her life she sits on the edge of her bed and feels like everything just might actually turn out fine. No one is going to burst in and drag her kicking and screaming to the noose. No speed or similar thank you very much, she has no desire to be sped up. But melt her, melt her under a heat lamp of anything

“Now if the Tylenol 3s aren’t enough that’s where some people need to use the Percocet.”

Percocet yes, shopping in Bloor West after her friend’s boyfriend’s hernia operation. Floating along, pale dry skin slowly caramelizing in the sun, fingering racks of scarves. She opens her mouth slightly and shrugs. “I guess we’ll see.” She nibbles on the pad of her pinkie. That should cover the next two break ups.

Pharmaceuticals aside, I think I found something. Something salty.