• Swallow the oblong blue pill, then another. Self-medication is the least embarrassing form of treatment. Take the pills in the bottles by the sink (whatever you can find); enough and you can go anywhere. Be anything. Choke down some water and swallow hard.

    Now wait.

    Soon, you will melt into a dream, clouds sprouting from your fingertips. You become a snake, sliding, practically dripping from the toilet seat, your eyes glowing with the moon. Slither down the hallway and up the stairwell, changing state and form to disguise your eternal sleepwalk. Don’t let your family see who you are behind the reflecting pools that are your eyes. Now is the time to return to your bed, where you will sink into the duvet, through the sheets and pillows and mattresses until you are swimming in a collection of starched white. You are heavy, folding into yourself as you sink, slipping into the cracks you’d through had healed. There is no need to worry; you will rise from the ashes. What you have written on the backs of your eyelids swirl into colors you have never seen, and the haunting thoughts carved into your skull are erased. Your body shakes, your hair stands up on your head possessed, and this slow wind takes you below your perpetual and unbearable awareness (whatever you do, don’t look down). Hues transform into a fuzzy brown, then into the safest black, which cradles you in the kindness of unknowing. You forget who you are. While you and dissolving into the fragment of your lost childhood, wondering why the television promised fairytale love, I will come to you in soft curls of smoke. “Never wake up,” I will whisper. “Never wake up.”