Zoloft (2016)
Maggie Dietz
Two weeks into the bottle of pills, I'd remember
exiting the one-hour lens grinder at Copley Square—
the same store that years later would be blown
back and blood-spattered by a backpack
bomb at the marathon. But this was back when
terror happened elsewhere. I walked out
wearing the standard Boston graduate student
wire-rims, my first-ever glasses, and saw little people
in office tower windows working late under fluorescent
lights. File cabinets with drawer seams blossomed
wire bins, and little hands answered little black
telephones, rested receivers on bloused shoulders—
real as the tiny flushing toilets, the paneled wainscotting
and armed candelabras I gasped at as a child in
the miniature room at the Art Institute in Chicago.
It was October and I could see the edges
of everything—where the branches had been a blur
of fire, now there were scalloped oak leaves, leathery
maple five-points plain as on the Canadian flag.
When the wind lifted the leaves the trees went pale,
then dark again, in waves. Exhaling manholes,
convenience store tiled with boxed cigarettes
and gum, the BPL's forbidding fixtures lit
to their razor tips and Trinity's windows holding
individual panes of glass between bent metal like
hosts in a monstrance. It was wonderful. It made me
horribly sad.
It was the same
years later with the pills. As I walked across
the field, the usual field, to the same river, I felt
a little burst of joy when the sun cleared a cloud.
It was fricking Christmas, and I was five years old!
I laughed out loud, picked up my pace: the sun
was shining on me, on the trees, on the whole
damn world. It was exhilarating. And sad,
that sham. Nothing had changed. Or
I had. But who wants to be that kind of happy?
The lenses, the doses. Nothing should be that easy.