Waking Up

when you wake up in the morning, you will wash down your medication with hand squeezed orange juice, fresh cranberry from concentrate, steaming earl grey tea, iced cold brew coffee, pick your eighth hour poison, whoever you are, because make no mistake, you remain the same person you were before. you will still wake up, pour a glass of the same damn thing, every single morning.

when you wake up in the morning, you will look at the promise of a bottle, and wonder to yourself, silently, hopefully, if that could be all it takes to get rid of the pain. you'll remember what your best friends told you, if you wanted to be numb, if you didn't want to feel, then you were to go ahead and swallow, but if you desired the colors of the world at the fingertips of your imagination, if you wanted to truly feel, then hold the pills at the back of your tongue until the thought police leave you to dream alone.

when you wake up in the morning, you will wonder if they ever understood it. ask yourself if they ever knew, if they ever saw the fact that you were so far down, that you would take freezing completely over being burned like this, depression forcing your hand to the fire for every single second of every single day. and you were never told that you would freeze, anyways, merely that you'd exist in a state of perpetual summer, the heat always there but much more survivable.

when you wake up in the morning, you will stare at them, that first day. you'll want to crush them up in your fist and throw the gritty powder out your window. but you'll inhale deeply, exhale quickly, knock them back and choke them down, like grape flavored childhood cough syrup. and for a moment, you might manage to convince yourself that being sick in the head is no different from a cough-cold-sniffle-fever malady. but then, you will walk outside and be hit with the striking reality that nobody stops for those whose minds are glitched.