upside down / rightside up

when i take my pills late, my old normal comes back. feeling weepy and as though i don't want to do anything. everything seems desperate and insoluble. the thing is it's very normal and familiar and it's intense, and it always makes me wonder whether the pills are numbing out feelings i should be having. i remember highs and lows, giddiness and heartbreak and think that i've been so even-keeled that it's kind of scary.

then i take the pills and a while later i feel better, and i can see that i was trapped and mired in those feelings for years and they destroyed me again and again, and they can't be the feelings i "should be having" either. it's like a playing card and whichever side is up, seems right.

when i'm upside down without the pills i think that maybe Loopy n I should have broken up back when we were in crisis. when i'm upside down with the pills i think that's insane, we're obviously meant to grow old together. when i'm right side up without the pills i miss people and remember things. when i'm right side up with the pills i think i can live with everything the way it is - at least for a while. upside down is whatever side you're not on; right side up doesn't seem to mean anything.

i read a good book today - a piece of graphic art so it didn't take long to read. in it there was a moment where two strangers meet while looking at a billboard where someone has scrawled "you are not alone" over the closed eyelid of a model. i thought about how much more that statement would have meant to me before the pills. how i felt lost in darkness and akin to other lost souls. now i feel like i've climbed into a boat that goes sailing blithely over the seas in sunshine and salty spray, and i barely remember what it was like down deep in the waters beneath my dry feet, where the lost souls still wander, seeking warmth in each other and so moved by the comfort they find.