Zoloft

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.

Source: That Kind of Happy (The University of Chicago Press, 2016)