64 Crayons

My sister says I have a photographic memory.

Perhaps.

Sometimes, I guess, I mean I can tell you about commercials that I saw on TV as a child but I don’t remember why I walked into the kitchen.

I can see a wind-up doll, wind me up like a music box

Sad

Mournful

Dejected

Depression hurts. Ask your doctor about Cymbalta.

This was before I really knew what depression was, before

I knew it ran in my blood, before

I understood why my mom was the way she was, before

I felt like I wasn’t enough, before

Everything, really, before

I…was.

And science was something I grew to love

An element of my past life, and maybe the present if I look hard enough

Pearson does a beautiful job with their illustrations and I remember

Flipping through textbooks until I could turn their pages in my mind

SSRI

Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor

Incredibly easy to spell and define, it

Keeps more serotonin in the channels of my mind or

Norepinephrine if it’s an SNRI

The simplicity of it all must be the reason why people say that I should have more control over me, myself, and I.

I can still see the frog nestled in my textbook, jumping over a stone wall

And some people say if I can make it at all,

Then the natural way is the best way to make it over the wall.

That wall is what’s between me and starting my day, and my meds

Actually do help me in a variety of ways, the most notable of which

Is knocking over the wall between last night and today so I can

Walk from one side to the other

And since I’m terrible at jumping, I’ll take it.

Or 64 crayons all over the floor and the corresponding box sitting on the table and

It’s not that I’m not able to function when I’m scattered, but

The people who tell me to think outside the box are the same

People who tell me to get it together

I inherited a personality that changes with the wind and depends on the weather

A lot of people who refuse to wear my shoes, let alone walk in them but

Seem to know exactly what I should and shouldn’t do

My sister says I have a lot of analogies for my explanations

I say that a lot of people want to fight about my medication

When life has given me horse pills to swallow and

They take gummy vitamins

But sometimes I wonder if what she says is true, she tells people like it is

Because some people won’t love you no matter how

Beautiful your metaphors are, not everyone is for you

64 crayons are in their box and the frog got over the wall

My meds aren’t all that there is to me but in their absence

It’s tough to be anyone at all.