For Ever

Anonymous

Forever \ for-ev-er\ n …: a limitless time.

A month ago taking medication no longer became a choice. More aptly I finally realized I had better become hooked. Forever. The trouble is … it took me forever to feel why. Not uniquely, the concept of "forever" felt troublesome. Just how long are times without limit? Long enough to say goodbye to childhood? Make a marriage work? Pretend aged parents will never die? Perhaps. In the case of medication I know forever is just long enough to kill, if it is for how long you decide to stop taking your pills.

My episodes start out identically. I scramble hundreds of conclusions, making successively more frantic decisions with a modicum of logic and larger drams of speciousness. Next comes a frantic call to the doctor. Inside my own prognosis of health prevails. I skip to a trusty homespun salve: stop taking everything! Joy! As suddenly colorless hues from an old, dark movie world invade. Both exhilaration and deepening draws from an elixir of potent physiological speed spin somewhere else. I rarely describe this darker world. It may be cousin to the dungeon to whose walls I imagine people with refractory depression cling. The disparities lie not only in the absence of qualities neurobiologists describe so carefully to science as taste or color. Heartaches of hopelessness cramp and descend bitterly, enveloping work and play in a forlorn sadness that knows best only how to bind spitefully to even larger residues of emptiness. I disassemble. Now my call to the doctor is not for a fix. I mouth simply the plea, "May I skip?"

Today I write because I feel better. Medication is part of my routine. I laugh and mean to joke. I can read. I had only one disaster; I spilled a cup of tea. More importantly I feel how the concept of "forever" can present and not hurt. Try feeling good about it! Forever may be for how long a good wine or fine cheese ages. The sun may take forever to set. Some men and women love forever. I like best the poet Shelley's reminder about Egyptian ruins that still lie in African deserts. But let us return to the concept of medication. Admittedly there may be a dire connotation to this idea of "forever" which lies only a stone's throw away. It may apply just as well to how you choose to accept loved ones or loss. Recall your monthly pharmacy visit. Forever, no, is always how long you are asked to wait patiently in the long, perhaps limitless line?