Miles

Miles

Sometimes lightning isn’t lost or taken from a person. Sometimes it get trapped. He’d been going to therapy since he was a small child, and the pills his parents and doctors gave him kept that spark inside of him in check. It was a strangling feeling, being trapped inside yourself, and he fought it with his pictures. Drawings of everything and anything that came to his mind; papers scattered across his room in clumps and stacks and sprays.
It was a way to communicate with people who wouldn’t listen to words. His mother had first ut him in therapy when he was seven because of his drawings. He’d shown her a picture he’d drawn, a picture of his dead neighbor. He still remembered every detail. The old man had died of a heart attack right there on the sidewalk and fallen to lay face up, eyes turning milky as they gazed at the sky.
Then, the little boy had sat outside and tried to wake his kindly neighbor up. Nothing had worked, but the child hadn’t started to cry. His parents had already explained to him that everything had a certain amount of time to live before they had to go be with God. He’d started to watch the way the man’s open eyes changed colors. Dark blue turned pale with whiteness and the little boy thought the old man was absorbing clouds into his eyes straight from the sky. Finally he’d grabbed a piece of paper and crayons and, as most children are wont to do, he drew the thing that caught his interest.
It had taken one look at a drawing of those eyes and that slack face to send him reeling into therapy rooms with one doctor and psychologist after another. Bipolar disorder. Depression, Schizophrenia. Even diseases that had nothing to do with his so called symptoms. Early onset Parkinson's (ridiculous), Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, etc. But his hands only shook when they packed him full of pills and he didn’t see white rabbits in waistcoats or other hallucinations.
There was nothing wrong with him except he’d done the wrong thing at the wrong time. He’d drawn a picture and nine years later was still paying for it.
Now, sitting alone in his room, he didn’t feel like a diseased teenager. He felt quiet and still and content as a pencil pressed against his palm and fingertips. A face was taking shape on the paper he held down with his free hand, the eyes staring out with a quiet presence. People had always been his favorite thing to draw because there was so much that could be done with a face. There were so many varieties that he could draw and draw and there would always be millions more people to sketch out onto paper.
Rain had come down earlier and now the sun sent weak yellow streaks of light across his room. One shimmered over the drawn eyes, and the boy smiled faintly. He hadn’t taken any ills since the night before last, and he felt good. He felt clean and alert and alive, but he knew it wouldn’t last. Withdrawals would start soon, the high price of a few hours of happiness. His hands would shake and he would get hot and cold as his body craved the pills it was used to.
He hated everyone during those times-especially his parents-and it felt like all that anger would crawl out of him and become an entity all its own. Except right now he was happy. Right now he felt like a real life was just around the corner.
The young man reached up absently, fingertips brushing his temple as he pushed a lock of shaggy blonde curls away from his eyes. He felt something spark inside of him, a little flickering light in the back of his mind where dust normally grew, and his smile spread slowly. Something was coming back to him; something he vaguely remembered. Thunder rolled outside, promising more rain later, and the boy had an ironic thought.
Maybe the little light in him was like lightning, and as long as his heart beat on its own the little flickering light would come back on its own. His thoughts were interrupted by the door to his bedroom opening.
He looked up balefully at the figure that stood there; a monster wrapped up in the pretty package of a concerned and loving mother. She looked like him-or rather, he looked like her. Fair skin, blonde curls, and a certain delicacy that made him look somewhat feminine and her like a model. But where his mother was looking at him with light brown eyes, he was gazing back with his father’s arctic blue ones. And they were angry.
“Don’t give me that look, Miles. It’s time for your medicine.” She said softly. There was a certain hardness behind the soft tone of her voice; she counted his pills regularly and knew that he hadn’t taken his dose last night or this morning. When he’d been smaller the punishment had been going to bed without dinner, but now she simply kept him locked in his room and forced him to come down for meal times. He spent more time locked in his room than anyplace else, but it was time spent with a grim feeling of victory. Every untaken or flushed pill was one that wasn’t going into his body, and he was learning to live without them.
But right now he’d have to live with a dose of them since his mother had a determined gleam in her eyes. “Okay.” His mother bustled into the room, scattering a few pieces of paper to the floor with her movements as she settled a tray in front of him. On it was a plate with a sandwich and chips, a glass of water, and a pill bottle.
He was down to only one type of medication for the moment. His current doctor thought that he had severe anxiety that could be cured with one magic bottle and one bottle only. His mother opened the pill bottle, dumped out two of the hated things, and glared at Miles. “Open.” He obeyed and his mother placed them on his tongue, handing him the glass of water. “Swallow.” He took a drink of water and opened his mouth, moving his tongue out of the way so that she could see the absence of pills. “Good boy.” She smoothed his hair back and kissed his forehead, leaving a lipstick stain. “Now eat your dinner. If you’re still hungry after there’s cookies downstairs- I just made them fresh.” He nodded. “K, Mom.”
She left without a backwards glance, confident that he’d obeyed her tonight. The second she was downstairs and he’d closed his bedroom door, the boy leaned over and retched. The two pills came up with a string of saliva and stomach acid. He smiled in grim satisfaction-the capsules weren’t even broken yet. None of the medication had made it into his system. His parents both searched his trash, so he ground the pills under the hells of his shoe and wiped the powder into a crack in the floorboards. It would stay there, lost to the depths of the house, and he would stay sane for another night. Defiance was a beautiful thing sometimes he thought to himself.
Sunshine slanted in over him, warming his skin as the faint grumbling of thunder sounded in the distance. The storm wasn’t over, but there was a brief lull where the sun shone and all was quiet. It felt peaceful, yet energy sizzled through his skin and the hair of his arms stood on end. The storm wasn’t over yet.
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