[formal request to invoke the Muses]
[clarification on muses required]
[Re: no, Muses capital M, the Grecians]
[Re: got it, thanks. Request granted]

Thank you.
The first time I had a nervous breakdown I was in love with you bad, sweetheart. I was
sunburned and the ache was something fierce—I was sleeping with ice packs and drip feeding
myself water and I could barely go outside. I also went blind one morning, a symptom of the
disease. I had it bad like I don’t even know how you’d quantify it. I had it bad like a bomb
blowing up a bridge. Bad like the wolf in the fairy tale. Like I couldn’t even look at you head on
because it’d burn my eyes.

The first time I had a nervous breakdown I didn’t realize it very much. It was kind of drawn out
and involved multiple injuries and apartments. The second time I had a nervous breakdown,
again; the clinical variety, it added a lot of definitions to my mental wheelhouse. I wasn’t
thinking about any person at all, just my face in conjunction with the bowl of the toilet. This
was somewhere in the desert middle of this month. Getting used to sleeping with nothing on
and the fan fulfilling its purely Aristotelian function. Then I had to get used to not sleeping at
all, and then get used to waking up in tears, or halfway across the room, or mid-sentence—out
loud. Some kind of strangled sound that had people pounding on my door: the dreamscape
already frayed around the edges, the dog with its jaw around my throat melting out of the dome.
The empty metro with the row of turnstiles, the hot, slick wound like a hole right through me.
Etc.

​

If you are WAY too drunk on your birthday by virtue of playing bartender for the rest of the
seated clan, so much that you can barely stay upright in your chair as they’re singing, may I
dissuade you from

 a) Giving too much zero-proof to your diabetic Grandma
b) Getting screamed at over the phone by your other Grandmother, one ear plugged, sitting
on the porcelain edge of the bathtub
c) Biting your fist in the backseat of a Honda for an hour (a Honda the same age as you)
d) Picking a menu that requires a lot of cuspidal ripping

e) Feeling anything deeply
f) Feeling anything deeply—remotely to do with Mother
g) Being alone for the rest of the night, twitching under the rip in the curtain, waiting
either for the sunrise or to wake up in a cold sweat

​

I want to have some kind of revelatory explanation for why I’m being curb-stomped
metaphorically by several different ghosts in the span of one day, the wrong day, note:

​

I want to be sat down and mumbled at for why it went first like an icicle puncture wound and
then my soul descending to hell. Why did it all have to happen on a crowded couch.

​

I have questions for the Titan of Forethought and pyric-salvation: specifically concerning
whether or not he ever wished for wings, a Kevlar vest, the ability to throw his voice somewhere
behind him, forgiveness. I think he needs a fortune cookie one of these days. I’d also like to
extend my sympathy, as I too have been bound, gagged, and tortured with consequences borne
from an acute lack of hindsight.

Here’s my cracked fortune cookie for Prometheus, bound and gagged and still left wanting
(ironically still left cold, probably):

​

Someone from your past will soon surprise you.
Lucky numbers: 1, 22, 26, 47, 19

Nothing to learn in Mandarin because it’s supremely triggering.

​