antidepressants

I remember the flattening out of things, the wash that is painted over the canvass. The vivid colours ease back to a sepia. Everything seen at a little distance like looking at an old nostalgic photograph. The teeth of the world are pulled, the talons retracted. I walk out into things and it is as if I am navigating inside a jumping castle. I bounce off life unscathed.

I look at a bowl of fruit now, un-medicated and there is a sudden image of those vivid limes inserted one by one into my vagina. This is an ordinary kind of response. I walk past a tray of peaches and my nipples prick at the thought of my breasts held naked against the sweet fur. This is how I live my life. The world is virile. Everything I touch becomes a part of my need for sex. I am used to it. I see the limes an I feel the quick contraction of my muscles and I walk on without acting on the initial urge. I assume that this is how we all are, struggling moment by moment to keep our sex at arms length.

The antidepressants hid the erotic potential of inanimate objects from me. A peach became a peach. A lime was for squeezing into a glass of water or for cooking. And sex was fine. Possible. Enjoyable. Fine. But each orgasm became a little thing, a cartoon of its true self, perfect in height and length but lacking breadth. I remember the ordinariness of sex on antidepressants. I remember my inability to write anything of any value. I had lost my edge, and with it went my grand passions. I liked and was liked but there was no tragic love or desperate lust, and so I am wary of it now. Perhaps, I think, and maybe, before I break every fragile relationship I value. Before I fire up on a book tour and open my mouth to let the horror of my insecurities vomit out into the world. Before I become paralysed with the terror of this thing that I have longed for all my life and that will finally come true. Maybe I should just take the antidepressants.

I pick up a lime and I cradle it on my palm and I sniff it and if it weren't for the painters in my courtyard I would consummate because in this moment this lime is the centre of the universe and if I am not intimate with it immediately I may die. If I were on the drugs it would be just a lime and I would slice it and drink it and that would be the end of it. I am not on the drugs and there is still the relative privacy of the bathroom with its fogged window and its closed door.