Last Night on Earth

i wrote the first draft of this lyric essay in my first nonfiction workshop in milledgeville. karen told me it had potential, but i put it away for a long time and didn't look at it again for about nine months. i don't know why i pulled it out again and started revising, since i don't really have any plans to submit it anywhere, but now that i have done some revising, i feel like i should do something with it. so, into the blogosphere it goes! fly, my pretty!

*

Last Night on Earth

1. Swallowing one at a time is easy. You're used to taking medicine this way, one round white pill and then one more, sometimes followed by a sip of water. Sometimes there isn't water, like sitting in church on Sunday mornings, or during the three-hour drive to Grandmother's house, and those times you swallow them dry, one and then one. You always have at least that many with you. They're in the giant white bottle in the kitchen cabinet, the first aid kit in the hall bathroom, a tiny green bottle in your mother's purse. In middle school, you started carrying your own travel-sized bottle of headache medicine in your backpack. You never knew when the pain was going to start.

2. Two at once isn't any more difficult than one, but there's a bitter aftertaste if you don't take them with water, if you don't swallow right away, if you're standing in the kitchen with them slowly dissolving on the back of your tongue, suddenly wondering how many you're going to take before you stop. There are two more pills in your hand, little round dots at opposite corners of your palm like on one side of a domino.

When you were little, your sister made a game out of spoon-feeding you the sweet purple milk left over after a bowl of Fruity Pebbles. She called it your medicine.

Two pills is the recommended dosage for adults and children over the age of twelve. You'll be fifteen in ten days.

3. You're counting. This is how you do everything. You count stairs as you go up them and you count footsteps from one room to another, from your bedroom to the kitchen medicine cabinet. You count the freckles on your arms and the number of blinds on windows and how many fence posts and telephone poles and blue pickup trucks between your house and the school because it seems important, like something you'll need to remember later, so you'll have the answer if anyone asks.

Three pills make a diagonal line down your hand, and you think about that line even after you've tilted back your head and let them fall into your mouth. You'd been doing your advanced geometry homework just moments before and now there are lines everywhere, the one you can still feel across your palm and one from your tongue to your stomach, where the pills are tumbling down. Thin pink lines on the kitchen wallpaper, the path you followed into this room from your bed, the line from your feet that comes out of the top of your head and keeps going up, keeps you standing. The line of motion your hand makes from your lips to the bottle sitting on the counter and back again.

You'll find out one day that you count because there's something broken in your brain, but for now you're pulling patterns out of this bottle, one pill, then two pills, then three pills, and it makes sense for you to do it this way. Next you'll have four. But you already know that you're going to leave some pills in the bottle. Your mother gets headaches a lot.

4. You can swallow them together easily, even without water. You're not drinking water because you didn't think about it before you started, and now that you've started you can't stop to get water because that would interrupt the pattern. Maybe you could stop for water after every fourth swallow, make it part of the ritual, but that's cheating and in your head it's a competition now. How many can you swallow at once without having trouble, without their little white bodies getting stuck in your throat? How many before you choke on them?

5. The first time you tried something like this you were eleven years old. The recommended dosage for you was one tablet, so you took three times that amount and waited all night for something to happen. When you woke up in the morning, you cried.

In about twelve hours, you'll be lying on a hospital bed telling a stranger about that night while your parents sit beside the bed listening. Your mother won't believe any of it, but it won't occur to you to care about that until later. When you tell the story, you'll be thinking about the pot of leftover chili that was sitting on the stovetop at home while you gulped down the pills. You'll be wondering whether or not anyone thought to put it away.

6. Two years from now, you'll be out at a restaurant with some friends, and they'll each order a Diet Coke to drink. The waiter will accidentally bring you a Diet Coke as well, and you'll take one sip, then clap a hand over your mouth and run towards the bathroom. You won't quite make it to the toilet before you start throwing up.

When your friends ask, you'll tell them you aren't feeling well. You won't tell them that Diet Coke tastes like rotten broccoli and sour milk to you because it's what a nurse mixed with the medicine they made you drink at the hospital when they wanted you to vomit. You won't describe the thick, gritty charcoal mixture they made you drink first that turned your teeth black or the way it makes partially-digested chili look like bubbling tar when it comes up. You won't say anything about the swirls of white pills throughout the black like little shooting stars, but you'll remember, while you sit at that restaurant with your friends, trying to count the stars on their dark background until a man in pink scrubs came and took away your puke-bucket.

7. You'd been arranging the pills on your palm the same way that dots are arranged on dice, but when you get to seven, you pause. You stare down at the tablets, trying to decide where to put the seventh one, and finally settle on rearranging them into a circle before you dump them into your mouth. Tomorrow night at the hospital, you'll dream about circles. Shapes and numbers and colors. When you get home in two days, your half-finished geometry homework will be lying on the floor exactly where you left it, and you'll pick up a pencil and start working on it again as though nothing had happened. Your hands will be covered in purple and yellow bruises from an IV needle that kept missing the vein.

8. Your throat is starting to get dry. You haven't even cried yet. Maybe you won't cry at all. A few minutes from now your mother will be screaming at you, trying to drag you down the hallway by the arms, and your socks will make you slip and fall on the wooden floor. She'll haul you into the bathroom and push you down to your knees in front of the toilet. She'll force you to stick your fingers down your throat, and while you feel how dry the inside of your mouth is, she'll tell you over and over how stupid you are.

When you don't throw up, she'll go and get the bottle of pills to see how many you took, if it's serious enough to take you to the hospital. But she won't remember how many had been in the bottle to begin with, whether it was a new bottle or an old one. She'll dump some pills into your hands. Was it this many? Then she'll add more. This many? How many? She'll dump the whole bottle into your hands, and the little white pills will flow over your fingers onto the bathroom floor with scattered tapping sounds as you kneel in front of her. They will look like they're jumping. More than this? she'll ask.

When you try to explain that you were saving those pills for her, she won’t understand what you’re talking about.

9. This time the pills stick to your tongue and you have to swallow twice to get them all down. The inside of your mouth tastes bad. For the rest of your life, any time you hold pills in your hand, you're going to think about this moment. You're going to remember the way it feels to have a mouthful of bitter, dry chalk and not be able to swallow it fast enough.

Now that you've broken the pattern, the only way you can think to make it right is try nine again. You'll just keep trying nine until you can do it properly.

9. You didn't know you were coming in here to do this until you were standing here doing it, so you're not sure what to expect. You're picturing your body with lines drawn all over it, dividing it into separate parts. You're picturing each part shutting down one after another, beginning with your toes and fingers. Is that how it works?

9. How many does it take?

9. When the stranger asks you why you swallowed so many pills, you're going to tell him that you had a really bad headache. He'll prescribe more pills and regular psychiatric attention, but you won't fill the prescription or go see a therapist. Six years from now, you'll come across the stranger's business card still tucked inside your mother's wallet. In seven years, you're going to try this again a different way.

9. You don't know what's going to happen. You have this idea that you'll collapse here on the kitchen floor and still be awake but unable to move your body, just a pile of separate parts that you can't feel, like the invisible line that keeps you standing was snipped with a tiny pair of scissors. You look around the kitchen and try to memorize everything. The way the magnets are positioned on the refrigerator, the number of dirty bowls in the sink, the smell of chili in the pot on the stove, the shape of everything. You think about drinking something. You think about going outside to look up at the stars. You think this is probably your last night on earth, your last opportunity. You don't know what's going to happen.

In the corner near the stove, the linoleum is peeling up a little bit. You'd never noticed that before.

9. If you can do all nine at once, does that mean you win? You stand there counting pills into your palm, arranging them into a circle. You count them and recount them and recount them. You're trying to remember the rules of your game. You're trying to remember if you're even still playing.

*