Page 11 of Slander
This is the rest of my fucking life.
Not the rental. Not the small town.
The grid. The squares.
The eggs Ihaveto eat so the medicine doesn't come back up.
There's no day coming where I get to set this down, no finish line where somebody hands me back the man I was before.
This is it now, every morning, until I'm an old man or a dead one, and most mornings I can look at that straight and not flinch.
Some mornings it sits on my chest like a boot, and I have to breathe around the weight of it before I can pick up the fork.
This is one of those mornings.
I can't remember what life was like before the diagnosis — before bipolar, before the mania that came with it.
I swallow the pills with the last of the coffee, rinse the cup, and set it in the rack, and then I lace up my shoes and go out into the heat.
The road past the rental is gravel and dirt for the first mile, then cracked asphalt the rest of the way to the county line.
I run it every morning.
Not because I love running—I don't—but because a body that's worked hard is a body that sleeps, and a brain that sleeps is a brain that stays where I put it.
The sun's barely up and it's already wet-hot, the air thick enough to chew, my shirt soaked through before I've cleared the driveway.
I run anyway.
Past the neighbor's place there's a truck in the drive, a porch with a wind chime, and a dog somewhere behind the house lets out one deep bark when I pass, like he's marking the time.
I don't slow down. I keep my eyes on the road, my breath in a rhythm, and I let the miles do what the miles do, which is empty me out until there's nothing left in my head but the slap of my shoes and the pull in my lungs.
For a mile and a half, I'm nobody.
No history. No diagnosis. No plethora of pills waiting on the counter.
Just a man moving down a road with his lungs on fire and his mind, for once, gone quiet.
I'd run twice as far for that.
But the road always ends, and the house is always there when it does—same as the pill organizer on the counter, same as the phone with its list of people I'm supposed to check in with. The quiet I run into doesn't last past the front step.
Back at the house, showered and dressed, I make the calls I'm supposed to make.
My sponsor picks up on the second ring. His name's Walter, he's sixty-one, he's been sober and stable for twenty years, and he doesn't waste my time or his.
"You eat this morning?" Walter asks.
"Two eggs."
"You take 'em?"
"Took 'em."
"You sleep?"
I turn the burner off and lean my hip against the counter. "Mostly."
