If I Gave My Plants Prozac, Would They Stop Dying?

I study the wilted plants decorating the windowsills and the blackened leaves littering the dull linoleum floor and the dried potting soil and feel nothing at all, barring a vague jealousy. Flies orchestrate dull harmonies as they target the fruit expiring in the ceramic bowl she painted. I push it off the counter and watch it shatter. I don’t blink. I don’t flinch.

I hoped I would feel something.

The visceral rotting aroma is masked by the toast that’s burning in front of me. I recognize that it’s billowing smoke and I don’t do it on purpose, but I don’t stop it. If my house was on fire (maybe I set it aflame, maybe I didn’t—what’s the difference?) I think I would watch it unfold like a five-act play, applauding as it dazzles me, evokes tears from my eyes, ensnares me while I marvel from the kitchen floor. Feeling warm would be nice, even at the expense of my flesh charring and melting off my tired bones. My greatest fear is that I am a phoenix, that if I set a match to my nest, I will rise from the ashes, reborn and immortal, instead of settling into an eternal sleep. I eat the blackened soot poorly imitating bread and it tastes the same as everything else that I’ve managed to put down this week.

She doesn’t understand this, though. She says it’s my responsibility to get out of a burning house, it’s my duty to save myself, to wrestle with disaster—to prevent it. She exasperates and begs and fails to reason. I should feel some desire for survival, some fear for my mortality, and I should want to stay alive. I’m not quite sure I’d call my existence “living.” I tell her that I’m just too tired today. Maybe I will be better tomorrow, a month, forever, never.

This isn’t normal, she declares. The world is bright and beautiful and there’s tons to stay alive for.

My world is monochromatic, I drone, and it’s true—I only see in shades of gray (nobody’s favorite color is gray). We live in different realities. There is nothing more for me to see.

According to her, I still had psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists left to see. They poke and prod and marvel at my ill mind, scalpel it into slivers and attempt to suture the fragmented pieces of my soul back together (was it ever whole?). She thinks they can seep dye into my ears and eyes and nostrils to color my psyche and maybe the world wouldn’t look so drab and maybe I would want to stay alive until tomorrow. I read somewhere that Vincent van Gogh ate yellow paint because he thought painting his organs the color of sunshine and flowers and happiness could make him become these things, could cure him of his misery, could make him happy like his paintings, could release dopamine and serotonin, could make his existence worthwhile. She tells me this isn’t true, that eating paint was a poison, a toxicity, a suicide attempt. She says I “romanticize self-destruction.” It’s a pretty story, though.

“Depression,” the shrink diagnoses, slapping a pen down on the notepad recording my “concerning” thought patterns, looking proud as if my symptoms were obscure—as if identifying my condition was the solution. I treat my new bottles of yellow happy pills decorated with smiley faces as candy, an upper when I’m “feeling blue.” The irony is that I now only feel and see a single shade of gray—the classic, timeless tombstone variant. My days squish and stretch, time speeds up and slows down, and reality (is this even real? is anything?) blurs into one suffocating hedonic treadmill. I think in fog and I’m not sure if I’m alive anymore.

I buy new plants for my apartment, replacing the deceased ones.

My mental health professionals love unpacking my dead—it’s their favorite topic. They drool over anecdotes of how I watched my childhood best friend rot from malignant tumors, how I spent my teenage years in hospital rooms, how I celebrated a sweet 16 in an ICU, how I wrote and delivered a eulogy before I was 18, how my best friend didn’t tell me their expiration date even though they knew, how I watched someone live and die before I was even alive, how I didn’t get to say goodbye (I guess I did but they were already half-dead), how I am utterly alone, how I don’t believe people will stay, how I’m glad I’m alone because people can’t choose to leave, how I don’t want people around anyway, how I don’t know how to go on living, and how I don’t want to.

“You have developed an avoidant attachment style,” my shrink diagnoses, once again. “You construct your life to create distance between you and all others to avoid the discomfort of commitment. In every relationship, you have an exit strategy. You must practice emotional intimacy without running away.”

I practiced intimacy, but not the way they intended. I let men fill me up then empty me, I grant them permission—I beg them—to turn my soul inside out and violate it and use and abuse it until it’s so misshapen that it no longer fits and I can shed this useless weight and finally leave it behind. Maybe I’d invent a new one that fits me better and lacks the baggage, maybe I could exist without it.

He loves being older than me. He loves that I’m still in high school, he loves being my boss at my job, he loves that he groomed me, he loves that it’s illegal, he loves that I keep his dirty little secret—that I am his dirty little secret, he loves that I am too young to know how to say “no,” he loves that he can tell me abuse is normal before I know that it is wrong. I love that the pain he inflicts overshadows the aching dagger already in my heart. He tastes like cigarettes and treachery and bad news and everything that will break my mother’s heart. He’s drunk off Jack Daniel’s and the fantasy of being Bonnie and Clyde; I am high off ecstasy and the danger of dancing with the Devil in hellfire.

This was not love—neither of us are capable—so we pierced each other with our mangled claws and bled through the sheets until the mattress oozed maroon and we called it romance. He “loved” me so much that he’d kill for me, and he did. I don’t know what he did with the body because I was preoccupied spilling my guts on the bathroom floor and shaking so badly that I chipped my teeth. I didn’t want to know, anyway.

“But it’s because I love you,” he explained, his patience running thin, his temper rising. “Don’t you understand everything I do for you?”

He drags me off the floor and slams me into the drywall, hard enough to crack it.

“I will never let you go,” he consoled with his calloused hands wrapped around my throat, pleading in his empty, black eyes (I understand, my eyes soften back to him—I know he needs this). My throat burns and I am suffocating—but isn’t this what I asked for?

This is what I get for not having an exit plan.

It’s been a couple years since him, but I swear sometimes I still wake up shrieking because my hands are caked with blood and red decorates my nail beds. I don’t think I’ll ever wash the stain clean. In a twisted way, I’m grateful for this terror, this paranoia—it makes me feel wiser. She always said I have a macabre obsession with suffering, the disillusionment that pain was tantamount to meaning.

It’s masochistic. She rolled her eyes.

But how else do I make peace with these scars? I ponder.

Other than trauma, he left me with a drug dependency. I stumble anywhere where I can forget my name, where I won’t recognize the reflection. The bartenders whisper about me behind the bottles and mutter sad sighs as they fill my glass again and again and I let it empty me. They say I’m “wasting my potential,” but I don’t believe in that. Potential is made up—it only materializes when you act on it and make it real; without that, it’s a fantasy, an illusion to trick people into thinking they matter, that they’re special. I don’t fall for these tricks.

Tablets melt under my tongue, and I trip down rabbit holes, waking up bruised and battered (it reminds me of him) in places I’ve never been to before with people I don’t know. There’s blood on my head (did I faint?) and blood between my legs (who?) from incidents I don’t remember. Sometimes I wake up in hospital beds with needles in my veins (not the needles I like). I speak in colors and my soggy, heavy words drip down my chest along with the vomit and mistakes I’ll repeat tomorrow. My white knuckles grip the bathroom counter (like he gripped my neck) and my nose bleeds as I chase white rabbits to nowhere (I’m going nowhere).

You’re killing yourself… she said, gazing at me through the mirror.

That’s the whole fucking point, darling, I slurred through my teeth, staring back with glazed-over, lifeless eyes.

On a particularly noteworthy bender, I scrambled my brain with fungi and MDMA and sobbed over a snow globe my (dead) best friend bought me on their Make-A-Wish trip. I was so high that I climbed the stairs (the elevator was too slow) lining my organs and unzipped my body and stepped out of my skin and sat on a couch suspended in disbelief, detached from my skeleton. I watched my life through a television, and I frantically flipped through the channels and saw all the other realities I could have lived and realized how I hated my movie, how I was plagued with the worst possible version of my life, how I was appalled by myself. It’s like you’re watching a horror film and, pausing it, you sigh relief that it’s fiction—that it’s not your reality—but then panic sets in as you realize it is your life (it’s my life!) and you must go relive that day after day in an endless loop and you cannot save yourself. It’s like a Choose Your Own Adventure book where I made all the wrong choices. I was doomed to go back into my wrinkled, tattooed, scarred skin and remain helpless as the puppeteer continued making a mockery of me. How could this be my life?

I stopped doing drugs and I stopped drinking after that. I cleaned up the dead plants in my apartment and bought new ones (again). I began missing my therapy appointments. I let my phone vibrate and I don’t listen to the receptionist’s voicemail and I stopped refilling my prescriptions and I let them bill me so she thinks I still go.

Maybe I just don’t want to get better.

The skeletons in my closet rattle as they dress my aching bones in the morning, and the monsters under my bed whisper lullabies as they tuck me in at night. I have conversations with the demons in the attic as we flush out all our nightmares and I play hide-and-seek with the ghosts in the walls. If they all leave, I will have to be enough to fill the empty space. I am afraid of myself. I will haunt my own apartment.

It’s not that I want to keep feeling like this—I just don’t want to forget.

You must forget, if you are to go on living, she coos.

I visit my best friend’s grave frequently (I don’t think this counts as forgetting). I like the solitude—there’s something comforting about a lawn full of dead people. Fertile soil intertwines the ribs of their fallen body, and I pretend my crying is a service, and that my tears will fill the watering cans that will bring them back to life. I don’t believe in fairytales, but I’d like to remain agnostic to that one (I don’t believe it).

The things you love never really leave you, she comforts.

Bullshit, I sneer. I’m bereft. 

I wrestle with the thorns and concrete under my feet and pick fights with the grass, cursing it for growing while the bodies under it do not (the grass never says anything back—what a coward). It’s ironic that we bring flowers to cemeteries and let these plants die on top of people that are already dead. At this graveyard, people (ghosts) collect the gifts each night and throw them away, so the foliage never wilts. It reminds me of the wilted plants in my apartment, how I don’t know how to keep things alive. When my plants die, I replace them and watch the process repeat. Maybe I do this with people too—I only love things with an expiration date. I am wilting, and I don’t know how to stop it. Can I reverse the damage? Can I save myself?

Do I want to?

I contemplate as I perch on the kitchen counter and light my cigarette with matches. I crack the window next to the faucet, rest my feet in the sink, turn on the water and let it run over the ends of my jeans, over my socks and wet my feet until they feel soggy. I light a match, let it burn my fingertips and drop it into the sink, onto my feet. I test if fire or water will win, how much the spark will catch before the dampness extinguishes it.

Inhale. Exhale.

I tap the ashes on my socks.

Inhale. Exhale.

I put the cigarette out on my socks.

I dangle my feet over the counter, listen to the tapping of water droplets, watching the pool grow beneath my feet (I leave the water running). I drop from the counter and sludge across the linoleum. I leave wet footprints, but I know they will be gone by tomorrow. I throw away all the (rotten) food in my fridge. I collect all the leaves off the floor, and I toss the dead plants in the dumpster (I don’t buy new ones this time).

I sit on the damp kitchen floor and light another match, watching it burn my fingers, and precariously drop it on my (damp) jeans. I wonder how long I can keep playing with fire.

Stop, she pleads. Please! You’re my best friend.

It doesn’t matter, I answer, preoccupied with the flames.

Yes, it does! she cries. I can’t live with you like this!

I look up, at nothing. I grimace. I grin.

But you’re already dead.