Hope In A Bottle

They say you can't catch lightning in a bottle.

Can you capture hope?

Can you distill it down from an elemental salt into powder and seal it into little portions?


Twice a day, once at bedtime, once in morning.

The past weeks have been a trying, dangerous time.

And I say that as someone who had fifteen surgeries in the twenty three months between April 2009 and March 2011.

As one who spent most of 2010 getting torn down, pulled apart, rebuilt; gaining, losing, regaining sight; shaping bone upon layer of bone so savagely destroyed.

Twenty three days at one point without solid food.

Thirty-three days on IV antibiotic infusions that generally required more than two tries apiece to get the vein to hold- some days as many as four.

To put it bluntly- I have been through some stuff.

So when I say that it's been difficult, I mean it's been difficult.

To be driven from sleep and eating by this twisting, anxious thing called a 'mixed state', then spend months with your brain being altered continually by medicines of one sort, only to have it turn on you and cause serious, dangerous side effects and reactions that send doctors who never register concern in their voices into a near tone of panic as they say "Stop it, now. Really, right now. Don't take your next dose."

No weaning off. No gentle shift in mood or physical reaction.

SLAM!

Face first into the brick wall.

You get so sick, and you shake and you churn and you sweat like you're dying of fever and wish at points you would. Then you sleep. For days. Because your body and mind cannot do anything more- there is nothing more to give. You are spent.

Then they start again- with something else- and you stare at the pill and you cry and wonder do I really want to do this? Is it really even worth trying to do this at all? Then you see the faces of people who say they love you- and you see the bright brown eyes, rimmed with artful lines of perfectly applied liner--the eyes of your sixteen year daughter-- and you know that you have to try. You may not want to, ever again. But you have to. So you do.

You do it. You swallow the tears and the pill whole, all at once. And then you can do no more for the moment, there is only to wait.

Soon it's pedal to the floor again only in a different gear this time and you feel and hear the grinding as it strips you down. You wonder if this is how normal thought is supposed to feel- if anything feels like it's supposed to feel or if anything you ever felt ever did.

And you start to wake up a little, only this time you think- hey, that other stuff really was making me sicker all along than I realized, physically. No wonder I felt like I'd been dragged behind a team of horses.

And you even think of prose and poetry about it though you can't work on your novel (NaNoRebellion may be a fail for this year- but there are still 9 or so days left...and hell I'm alive, that's what matters right now)

...and you begin to think about painting and you think that it might be nice to just sit and read a book for a little while in the new-born silence.

So you do.

You have poetry come to you in bursts of short lines that you can't write down fast enough.

And you think about how you've always written poetry- and how the research supports the fact that the poets always were the craziest of the art community lot, statistically.

I wish I had the genius to go with the madness. But one takes what one is given.

All the time you wonder, will this be the pill that makes it all fall apart?

The little pink capsule of light or doom, so unassuming--better or worse than tiny dark pills or shiny yellow?

Will it undo the faltering threads that remain of me, unraveled into nothing?

Will this be the one that mars my skin, rots my teeth and makes my hair snap off? Send my weight into the stratosphere where my mind has so rarely but memorably resided?

Or is this my best chance at solid ground? Drawing on a well of strength to build on a wall of earth to count on--for safety, for shelter. With land below once more and heavens above, replacing upside down that has been for so long.

Will it take the colors-- remaining vision and the light?

Will it tremor my hands and imprison my soul, take music from my fingertips, keep words from my pen and my paintbrush from all canvas?

Was I serious when I meant that I'd give all those things up if only to be normal? Too late to wonder now.

Will it be the thing that finally sets me free? Some unimagined ray of heaven or unforeseen sliver of Hell...some part of each but somehow best of neither?

Only time can say what's so.

Someday perhaps I'll learn

Someday, maybe in hindsight, I will know

...if you can catch hope in a bottle, and absorb it.