literature

Prose: Lithium

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Literature Text

Lithium.

Oh dear god… Lithium.

I sighed deeply and looked at the orange pill bottle that was sitting in front of me. In my head, I could see the pharmacist's face when I handed her the prescription, the pity and the judgment.

I stared at the little pink pill that lay inside my palm—that horrible pink pill with the little brown writing. This small pill had such powerful affects. I didn't know what this was going to do to me. What if it kills me? What if it takes all my problems away? What if it doesn't do anything?

How is that this small pill, this element have such an impact?

It seemed so simple when I had to study it in science class. It is number 3 on the periodic table… I still knew this from all that time ago.

However, this wasn't science class. This wasn't high school. This was life. This was my life. My poor, sad, depressed life. I couldn't get anything together, so what does my therapist do? Prescribe me Lithium. Zoloft didn't work; neither did Prozac, nothing worked. I could've shoved all those pills down my throat and, if it wouldn't have killed me, it still wouldn't have done anything. This was the sad story that was my life.


My therapist looked at me in a trying-to-be-consoling-way. "Think of it as this," he said. "It's just a salt," he said. In my head, I heard 'It's just a salt… A salt that you must be sure to drink PLENTY of water with or you would die, but really, it's just a salt.' My cure. My magical cure. My fucking recipe for fucking happiness dwelled in this fucking small goddamn pink pill.

Pink? Why is it all pink? Was pink itself a magical cure? Maybe if I stared at the color pink for the rest of my life I would be happy. Maybe if I died my hair, eyes, my fucking skin pink, it would all be better. However, I'd have to go beyond that. My house, my walls, my car, my bed, my mirror, doors, books, CDs, lights all of it. I'd paint and dye everything pink and then everything would be okay.

Lithium. Lithium. L-I-T-H-I-U-M.

No matter how I said it, how I spelled it no matter how I looked at it, no matter how it looked in different writings, no matter how it sounded coming out of other people's mouths, it still was just a salt. It still was a small pill that I had to put inside my mouth and drink a gallon of water with, but somehow that was how I was going to get better.

Pills don't make it better. They just mask it. I can't ever be cured. I can't ever be truly fine. What I have, what I am, there is no magical cure. Sure the pills can make it seem I'm happy, they can even fool me. However, deep deep deep down, I'll always know the truth. I'll always know that I'm not cured. I am not fixed. The pills will forever only treat a symptom I have. Never me, I will never be okay.

I've pulled myself out of darker holes before, or at least, I thought I had, so why not now? Why wasn't I able to pull myself out of this one? Was this the worst of it? I knew Lithium was the bottom, but they say when you hit bottom, you have nowhere to go but up. I beg to differ. When you hit bottom, you can always dig down deeper and find a new bottom and a new one after that and a new one after that and a new one after that and a new one after that and a new one aft—

I had to stop that. I had to stop it all. I needed to just stop all this craziness; it was only making it worse. However, I suppose your therapist handing you a prescription for Lithium means you've made it pretty bad. Once you get told you need to be put on Lithium, you know you've gone too far. You are now too far delved into madness and your only hope is Lithium….

Scribbling this all down, I knocked over my bottle of magical cure and I watched as I saw the small pink dots scatter across my floor. I stared at them and realized something, in the way they fell, the seemed to shape and a heart. I stared at it and it made me angry. My eyes filled tears of hatred and I let out a blood-curdling, anger-filled, air-piercing, heart-stopping scream. I threw myself down onto the floor and shoved away the pills as fast and with as much force as I could. I screamed and cried as I rolled around on my floor, in true insane fashion, and threw handfuls of pills across my house, hoping they'd disappear forever.

I lay still on my floor and waited for the tears to dry. It seemed they slowly began to evaporate and with them, my will to continue on with this life.

I sat up and picked up the pill bottle. There were three pills left in it.

Three of them, one by one I put them in my mouth and swallowed.

Three.

Two.

One.

I took them down and I could feel them in my stomach. Fuck water.

If there was no coming back from Lithium… then I wasn't coming back at all.
First off, this is complete fiction. Obviously, I'm not dead, I've never taken Lithium nor am I in therapy. This is just something I came up with spur-of-the-moment. Also, I felt like I wasn't writing enough lately. I don't wanna lose my touch.
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Nemononiam's avatar
This is amazing!
Really, fantastic job.
This is going to haunt me for a while, I can tell...