20mg Escitalopram Oxalate and Alcohol

by Bella Aase

Image credit: Hailey Kean on Unsplash

I'm in this dream

Sitting unbothered on an unstable wooden

chair in any pharmacy

Someone has screwed open my cranium

Drill cut a circular lid, osseous jar

Scooping up my mind like strawberry Jell-O

Wriggling on a rusted silver spoon

I watch the featureless stranger take a bite

Drop the spoon in my skull bowl with a numb plink

and say: Tastes bitter.

I'm lying half awake

Folded and confused in a darkened

Apartment, iodine streetlight aura

Cut dull through night blinds and blurry

Pupils, dizzy, my brain rusted to pieces and

Lucid, I watch the dream again, less vivid,

My mouth dropped ajar and numb, not screaming

I watch bone pry open, pink flesh tasted

I'm dead, probably, as in 

I died, and I don't really care

Drop the floating thought with a metallic clatter

and listen: I don't care.

***

Bella Aase

Bella Aase (she/they) is a recovering perfectionist with Bipolar II disorder. She is a graduate student in the MFA creative writing program at Hamline University and has a Substack called Wax and Sonder. Their work has appeared in Serotonin and This Was 2020. Bella lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota with her husband, John, who is also a writer.