All Right And

The pills, when dumped, from a glass, drying in windowlight, on the table, leave little whitish traces like geologic strata unburied in some exotic place. These are for imbalances, and your daughter sees a tightrope walker who hands out balloons on the way down. You eat an ice cream from a vendor who has more physical problems than you, but maybe not as many mental ones. It’s hard to say. The pills are vacating the seat of responsibility. They make you: calm, kind, balanced, and your toes monkey around the tightrope. They also make you: not you. One thing to be done is to talk to people who aren’t there and use a set of symbols to depict them on the dead skin of a once living thing. But when you do this, everyone will think the stories are all about you. You can use “you” not as a stylistic choice, but because the “I” doesn’t make sense anymore. The “I” is far away from you. So the pills, when flushed, down the toilet, reflecting moonlight, in the bathroom, spiral into pharmaceutical galaxies and medical-stellar nurseries that you’re now the creator of. There is life on the pills and the few seconds it takes to flush them down is enough for civilizations to rise and fall. You can read all the books you see and run till your shadow lies down behind you, shadowlegs moving to keep up, but more like writhing; convulsing; seizing. Monday will be it’s your responsibility. Tuesday will be you have a problem. Wednesday will be the middle of the week because a week has seven days in it. Your daughter will sit with you and cry with you on the floor, but her crying will be fake and she will laugh to see you laugh. Billions of years have elapsed to bring you your daughter, a human, sitting on the floor with you and laughing to see you laugh. On Thursday you will love life and everything in it. On Friday you will give yourself a sobriety test down tracks overgrown with weeds, where the antique trains are sometimes kept, next to the real thing, where the commuters pass, because their tracks need to be maintained, and when you hear the bells closing in you can imagine that just this once they’ll be coming for you. Saturday and Sunday will be when you see him. You will spend the other five days preparing for these two days. You will spend Saturday and Sunday in the bathroom, swiping through your feed as he swipes through his in another room. Silence can be a different kind of silence. In the silences you will be alone together. Words can be pills you connect when you give up swiping through your feed. Fifty milligram words can pile on the page where you sift through and choose the ones you want to take. Your life is your daughter peeking around the door, waiting to see if it’s crying time or angry time or what. There are many different times. So there are choices. You can see him Thursday, and Wednesday too. You can pick the flowers. There are so many flowers. And the flowers, when picked, in the sun, feet in a mud puddle, look like petaled bridges to the daughter that you have because she is yours, green stems and yellow petals, and the thorns sometimes, but the thorns are all right, and the mud puddle’s all right, and the sky’s all right, and you’re all right and