Yes, Rare Form.

Today I washed down my anti-depressants with a martini. I could feel the three-pill cocktail press and open my esophagus all the way down to my stomach. The martini didn’t really do much but help it get past my uvula without incident. It didn’t even seem to coat anything on the way down. And I liked it like that – invasive, threatening and slow … until they met with the bile in my stomach. The martini tasted all the more sweet when I thereafter raised the glass to my lips, if for no other reason than it wasn’t chalky, lumpy and pushing my insides to do things it really didn’t want to do. It pleased my palette and ran down my gullet eagerly, effortlessly and carefree. It’s crazy how I needed that drink after today … and that I really needed those pills after weeks of feeling off-kilter … and how they really, really didn’t need each other. It’s like one was my black wife and the other was my Puerto Rican mother – in my past life, both were there, both were necessary and the only thing deeper than the river Amazon was their hatred for each other. I’ll let you figure out who was the ineffective anti-depressant and who was the bitter-sweet alcohol.