"Lisa Says It's A Gift"

Indie Zecchino

Living like this...it's like, it's like living with a monster. Whenever the monster wants to eat, you need to feed it, even if it bites off more than it can chew. Whenever the monster wants to roar, you need to let it be heard, even if it tears down every careful building and thoughtful wall you have spent your whole life constructing. And when the monster decides to sleep? You are grateful for a reprieve, never knowing when it will rear its ugly face again. The only thing that's certain is that it will be back.

The monster is tricky though, subtle and smart. It has disguises – in the beginning, you do not know how sinister it is. You call it many names, mistaking it as it guises itself under various identities: genius, you might call it, or creativity. You might call it charm or you might call it a quirk...or maybe, if you are that gravely mistaken, you call it by all of these names, failing to see the singular culprit beneath every single mask. But these are easy mistakes to make – you are not to blame. Especially not when your whole family, all your friends – even your doctors and your teachers will declare all these traits innate in you! Hell, they will praise the monster! They will feed it, gorge it until it bulges, sloppy and disgusting in all its gluttonous glory!

But this is where the illusion starts to fall apart.

Like a seasoned junkie, the monster has reached a point of tolerance and it craves far more praise and attention than it can get from the outside: it begins to tear away at itself, feeding off of itself, making you a prisoner to a compulsory kind of narcissism. Priorities become mixed and jumbled until the only thing that matters is approval. You need to hear that you're good at what you do just one more time. And criticism becomes like a sharpened whip – harsh and offensive as it slaps you across the face, completely unexpected.

Now, when the monster wants to feed, you do all sorts of incredible, degrading things. As though in effort to rid itself of its own affliction, the monster seeks to destroy its host in its quest for a stronger high. You find yourself in situations you otherwise would avoid – waking up on a gleaming linoleum floor, unable to remember exactly how you got there; swallowing pills like they're candy and practically drinking Patrón out of a juice box; falling asleep in the arms of more than one stranger at a time...all concern for yourself is lost amongst the mutinous hunger of the monster.

Now, when the monster wants to roar, you become its medium: its roar is the blood-curdling scream that tears from your own throat in a fit of terrifying anger. Your gratuitous obscenities can be heard across the street – it's a miracle the neighbors have never called the cops. Not only do you scream and swear and slander, but you also rampage through the house: plates are broken against walls, personal mementos broken, feelings (and sometimes people) destroyed. With the monster driving behind you, like a master behind his slave, you are capable of crushing an entire household. You have accomplished feats of horrific proportions: you have made grown men cry, you have brought superiors to their knees, and you have kicked and screamed your way out of upholding the same expectations as your equals.

And now, when the monster goes to sleep? So do you. As the monster sleeps, you implode: the entire world comes crashing around your ankles and shatters into a hundred thousand jagged pieces, too broken, too mutilated to be put back together. As the monster slumbers deep beneath your skin, you become ashamedly aware of everybody's eyes on you – this is attention you never wanted. It kills you inside that your own mother tiptoes around you, as though you are a bomb with uncertain origin and without any proscribed target. You are unpredictable: while the monster sleeps, not even you can predict the next awakening. You can't control the beast now that it's had a taste of this new dimension of power. You do not own it! Nor can you tame it! If anything, it commands you; it owns you; it has tamed you.

You have become a vehicle for this despicable creature, this horror of your own invention. It lives inside your very veins, where nobody can get to it. Like the cunning coward that it is, the monster is beyond visible recognition: it is allowed to wreak its deplorable havoc and you get to take all the blame. Worst of all, it's you I see in the mirror every morning, when I reach for the one thing that keeps the monster at bay.

The blue and white pills would otherwise be innocuous in my palm, were their purpose different – their purpose is almost as difficult to swallow as they are. It rips me apart inside, knowing that these tiny little pinpricks of sanity are the only things standing between me and the monster within. Mother says it's the same as her diabetes – that the pills just adjust me. But she is wrong. It is not the same. I cannot get inside an MRI and pinpoint the location of my malady. They could prick my arms with hundreds of needles – they have, haven't they? – and all the blood in my body would never reveal the nasty truth that runs rampant through every artery. No amount of biopsy punches ever peeled back the secrets of my innermost tissues and though they tried and tried, not a single doctor was ever capable of decoding the dark secrets that lurked inside the patterns of my fingerprints.

My infection is not tangible. So fuck her for trying to tell me it's the same.

I have to inhale an enormous amount of oxygen to slow my heart, whose rhythm has begun to resemble that of the random gunfire of a loaded AK-47. I raise my palm to my mouth and crush the pads of my fingers gingerly to my chapped lips, and swallow. I still wince at the feeling of the capsules pulsing down my esophagus. Maybe it hurts because I'm not used to it...or maybe it hurts because every morning, when I press my hand to my mouth, I swallow my pills with resentment, resigned to dependence worse than any street drug.

But, it's better to be resentful and free of the monster than being a puppet to myself, isn't it? Isn't it?