CW: Big Pharma, dead animals, mental illness

I’m still half asleep. I just dragged myself away from my cat, who inevitably started acting cute right as I grabbed my keys, and now I’m preparing my customer service brain for work. Then I’m accosted by lowercase “d” death.

This happened to me every morning for about a week. I would walk down the stairs to my car and spot the dead bird, each day surprised it was still there, and each day saddened by the ubiquity of mortality. Every day started with a bad omen. Add onto that the fact that issues with the pharmacy prevented me from taking my antidepressants, and those five days began to feel like a dark episode of The Twilight Zone.

Today, however, I walked outside in my Hadestown T-shirt and green, checkered Vans to find that the dead bird was gone. My hope is that the bird’s body was taken by another animal to continue the circle of life, but more likely someone called a maintenance person to remove it. 

Fortunately, I have an understanding mom who is willing to help me when I struggle, and she helped facilitate getting my meds back into my hands. (Thanks, Mom. Love ya.)

I have a complicated relationship with relying on lifelong medications (including testosterone, which is something I choose to take as a transmasculine person), as most people who rely on pharmaceuticals do, but this experience really proved to me that my mental illnesses are, in fact, real illnesses. It’s something I knew cognitively, but not emotionally. 

This is all a long-winded explanation for why I didn’t post a short story mid-month as I normally do. 

I have this compulsion to over-explain everything I do, which I’m addressing in therapy, but I do think this tendency can be helpful at times as a writer. Everything has good and bad in some ratio. And this is one of the few times an “everything” or “always” doesn’t feel like hyperbole to me.

I live in a world where pharmacies make consumers do extra work when insurance changes, where birds die and sit there for days, and where moms and friends can look out for me better than I look out for myself. I live in a world with an adorable cat that begrudgingly loves me. A world in which my sister is one of my closest friends, in which I can live honestly (if not entirely safely) as a queer person, and in which I can stop on the sidewalk to pick up a penny. Although I think that last one might be specific to where I live.

I’m writing all of this while my cat is curled up on my jacket next to me and the Nebraska wind is blowing through my windows. I hope that bird’s body has given some other animal a good meal, and I hope that healthcare will get better in the U.S. soon. But most of all, I hope that you, dear reader, will forgive me for skipping this month’s short story. 

-Ryn PB