The Girl Next Pill

"Find whom you love and let them kill you, would you engrave that on my stone?" I said to her as I unclenched another beer can and tossed it into the fire. Not really a good campfire talk but I wasn't much of a happy camper anyways. One thing I loved about her was her utter confidence that I wasn't even remotely broken, she would never attempt to fix me, even in my mid-night suicide talks. She would list me all the latest revolutionary self-harm methods, she's creative that way. Dark she undoubtedly was, yet I could taste her sweetness like Hershey's finest.

They gave me these pills the day I graduated from Bethlem Asylum, said they'll make everything fine and dandy. 15 years I rotted away behind them pale walls. Severe schizophrenia, a mental illness they called it, I think of it as my mind's own special way of transcending my humble every-day momentous existence.

On June 23, 1950, I popped one. That's when she first knocked on my door. Three gentle taps were the birth of what soon became the most surreal relationship of my life. I slowly opened, and there she stood. A finely sculpted nymph, caramel coated with hazel eyes, exotic pitch-black silk for hair, every strand wildly dangling before the other. I was standing before symmetrical perfection, yet every thing about her said chaos.

She told me where she lived, "in the pill" she said. I didn't mind. Those pills, a cure for the love-lorn is what they are. I was highly vulnerable by then, 15 years in the sanitarium left me with an extreme thirst for companionship. An hour after our first encounter, I was madly, deeply in love. In fact I'm surprised it took me so long. I recognized her voice right away, that harmonic voice that sent me to Bethlem, the one inhabiting my head. She said one thing, I said another, next thing I knew I was truly lost in those hazel stars. She would flash me with that gleam in her eyes, and I was a goner.

We used to curl up on the Brompton cemetery grass, make up all kinds of twisted stories about each and every soul lurking upon her tombstone. It was highly sadistic. I loved it. She always made sure every soul in her story had a faint hint of good inside, just enough to make them human, I guess she didn't go full-cynical as I did, not yet at least.

The sex was bizarrely erotic. I could sense every breath, every tip of her hair gently brushing against my face, yet I couldn't feel them, I couldn't feel her. I engaged in physical intimacy with a hologram, a mirage. She would reflect my every move, I thrust right, she thrust left, I pulled she pushed, it was like a sensual dance with my alter-ego.

I was instructed to take a pill a week. I gulped down the whole container in one week. Each day more pernicious than the next, on the seventh day I was fatally strung out. I was dying.

She stood up, and wickedly danced around the campfire, "I could engrave it, but what if your spirit had a change of heart and haunted me from beyond your grave." I laughed, she kept on dancing, and slowly I fainted away as I watched the flames sway along with the girl next pill.