Numb.
For various reasons, I've been taking pills. You know, to make me feel okay. It can be quite like a weight on my chest. I could breathe, barely, but I cannot smell. I can open my eyes, but cannot see. It's nothing. Not darkness, not black, I was feel nothing. A pill altered my life,—and, perhaps more importantly—my personality. The stuff that makes you one in eight billion, what we value most about the self. The rarity of that internal, personal, emotional essence grows more and more, the more folks forget to use condoms, the less often people take their last breaths, and hopefully for them, in hospital beds rather than in a large swathe of fire accompanied by wails for help. Given prior circumstances, numb was better. Not good, just better. I went from a complicated pit with nuanced ridges to the flat surface above. I wouldn't say it was bad, to have pain ebbed away. All feelings and opinions pushed aside, and I was left with.. nothing. I felt like a passenger in a train w...
