Cold Turkey (Eighteen Again)
On accidents. TW for maybe literally everything. 02/22/2026.
It’s hard not to imagine my life as it could be. When my eyes are swollen shut, I can either choose to stare at the light I trapped in my eyelids, or to see something— the future, a dream, an alternate reality. I know, I know I could realize this vision if I just eat better, if I get more exercise, if I write and read more, if I socialize more freely. And I do. Every few weeks, I find myself manic with contentment, drinking watered-down cocktails and telling friends I’ve never been happier not ever. In fact, tomorrow I will run a marathon and cook all my meals and write the next great New Jerseyan novel and watch the entirety of Nicole Kidman’s filmography. Tomorrow I will have sex when I wake up and before I go to sleep and even a couple of times during the day; tomorrow I will love without inhibition and I will go outside to pet dogs and tell the owners I-love-your-outfit-where-did-you-get-that-bag.
Today I am in the club waiting for someone to offer me a cigarette so I can decline and tell them I’ve quit. Today I am in the club. I am in the club. I am in the club with a drink in my hand and Daddy Yankee playing while my hips try their best and my feet gasp for air. I am in the club and I know the people next to me and I am wondering if we are going home. Tomorrow I will have a hangover and a cold and I will cry for eight hours on the phone to someone I love. Because really, every few weeks, I find myself on the edge of something— an episode, a coughing fit, the bathtub, naked and dripping and whispering the words of songs I once knew until I know them again, viscerally and truly.
I did not mean to quit my antidepressants cold turkey. I came here sure they were tucked away in my luggage with my Spiro and my birth control, to manage my mind and my face and my blood, those things I detest. When my mom tried to mail them, she found them returned in our house’s mailbox, denied entry into this country. It would be okay. They were initially prescribed for migraines anyway, or that’s what I was told, or that’s what I thought when I was seventeen-turning-eighteen and spending my days lying in the shower until burns appeared on all the parts of my body that I hated. But I haven’t had headaches like that since I started taking my pills. I don’t need them, I’m happy. I’m in love or I think so and I made friends and I’m abroad and why would I cry when there is so much to do and see. Besides, it’s only a few months. It would be okay.
They don’t tell you that when you go off the meds you started taking when you were seventeen-turning-eighteen, you will begin to feel like you are seventeen-turning-eighteen again. That you moved forward, but you didn’t make any progress. That you will want to kill your body one lack at a time as much as you will want to kill everything you love, and you will do it over and over again until your body stops responding and until they don’t love you back. Tomorrow you will drink a glass of water and eat grapes and look in the mirror a lot and not leave your room unless somebody forces you. You will sing yourself to sleep when your mom doesn’t answer her phone. Maybe you will think about what happened to you this summer and throw up, but you can’t be sure. Tomorrow you will go to the club and turn twenty-one and you will never be happier until you go home, where you are a dying kid. Dumb and dramatic, but dying all the same. I’ve spent my life as I’ve spent my days— wondering when I am going home. Wondering when it is over. I would like to go back on my meds.