EVEN AFTER A SLEEPING PILL

Krishna Prasad

I took the temazepam an hour ago... heavy dose. The kind the doctor writes with a pause before handing over the paper... the kind the pharmacist double checks with a look that says are you sure? I’m not sure of anything anymore... but I swallow it anyway. I’ve been swallowing things for months trying to make her leave my head. Seven years... Seven years of her, and I’ve spent every day since trying to scrub her out of my marrow. Seven years is not a number you can hold in your hands... it’s a language you forget how to speak once the other person stops listening. It’s a house you built room by room, knowing every creak in the floorboards, every window that caught the morning light just right... and then one day you’re standing outside and the key doesn’t fit anymore, and you realize you were the only one still calling it home. I don’t want to remember it now... the details, the small things, the way she used to leave her coffee cup on the counter and I’d pretend to be annoyed but really I loved finding evidence of her everywhere. I don’t want to remember the sound of her laugh or the exact shade of her eyes or the way we fit together in a bed that now feels like an ocean. Remembering is a door I’ve been trying to close for months... but the door is stuck, and every time I think I’ve finally walked away, I find myself standing in front of it again, palm flat against the wood, wondering if she’s on the other side wondering the same thing. Eight therapy sessions where I sit across from a woman who asks me how I’m feeling and I say fine because what else is there to say? I’m feeling like I’d set myself on fire just to feel something other than her absence. Dozens of medications... antidepressants, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, sleeping pills that come in different colors and different names and all do the same thing... not enough. I’ve taken them all. I’ve lined them up on my nightstand like soldiers. I’ve swallowed them with water, with nothing, with the desperate hope that this one would be the one to finally sever the wire connecting my chest to wherever she is now. It didn’t. None of them did. There was a night I don’t fully remember. Or maybe I remember it too well. The way my hands shook while I counted out pills... the way the bathroom floor felt cold against my cheek... the way the paramedics had to break the door because I wasn’t answering. I woke up in the ICU with leads glued to my chest, a screen beside me showing the rhythm of a heart I wasn’t sure I wanted to keep. Beep... beep... beep. A sound that meant I was still here, still breathing, still failing to leave the way she did. Two days in that bed. Different nurses in different scrubs, each one introducing themselves like I’d remember their names. I don’t. I remember the ECG paper trailing out of the machine, the jagged lines that meant nothing to me except that my body was stubborn. I remember the way the fluorescent lights never turned off, even at night, like the hospital didn’t trust me with darkness. I remember the social worker who sat by my bed and said we’re going to get you help and I thought help for what? For loving someone so much I forgot how to exist without her? They discharged me with more prescriptions. More therapy sessions. More of the same. Months have passed. I’ve lost count. Time doesn’t move in days anymore... it moves in therapy appointments, in refill dates, in the space between sleeping and waking where I still reach for her in the bed beside me and find nothing. Seven sessions. Dozens of pills. Two days in ICU. A hundred nights of swallowing heavy doses and waiting for the mercy of oblivion. And still, I’m here. Writing this. Thinking about her. Seven years is not something you recover from... it’s something you learn to carry, and I carry it everywhere. In the online store when I see the brand of cosmetics she used everyday. In the way I still turn my head when someone laughs the way she laughed. In the dreams where she’s still beside me and I wake up reaching for a warmth that was never really mine to keep. I don’t want to remember the details... I don’t want to give them air... but they live in my bones anyway, quiet and patient, waiting for moments like this when the medication isn’t strong enough to drown them. Thinking about everyone who left before her... the friends who drifted, the family who couldn’t handle the weight of me, the people who looked at my grief and saw a thing to walk away from. Thinking about the lowest point, the bathroom floor, the paramedics, the way the ECG beeped like a metronome counting out the seconds of a life I didn’t know how to want. The temazepam is pulling at my limbs now. My body is sinking into the mattress, heavy as a corpse. But my mind is a furnace. Everything is burning inside me... Years, the loss, the unanswered questions, the anger at myself for still caring, the grief for the person I was before she became the center of my gravity. The fire doesn’t care about doses. It doesn’t care about therapy or hospital visits or the careful way doctors say it takes time. It is the only thing that has stayed with me from beginning to end. I close my eyes. Behind my lids, I see her. Not the version that left, but the version from the beginning... the one who laughed with her whole body, the one who made me believe I was worth staying for. I reach for that image the way I reach for the pill bottle... with desperation, with hunger, with the pathetic hope that maybe this time it will be different. It never is. Those years are a long time to hold someone in your hands... and it’s a longer time to let them go. I keep thinking there must be a version of me somewhere who has moved on, who wakes up without the first thought being her name, who doesn’t measure the passing of months in therapy sessions and prescription refills. That version of me feels like a stranger... like a photograph of a life I was supposed to live but somehow missed. The drug is winning. My thoughts are fragmenting, breaking apart like ice on a river. But in the last seconds before sleep takes me, I am still thinking. About her. About the therapy sessions that haven’t fixed anything. About the dozens of medications I’ve swallowed like prayers. About the ICU, the nurses, the ECG that kept beeping even when I wanted it to stop. About everyone who left, and the one who stayed... me, for reasons I don’t understand. Tonight’s dose will pull me under. But the fire will be waiting when I wake. It always is.