Children cry in restaurants, they cry on planes, and they question why this shade of red is not the same as this shade of pink.

In these scenarios it isn’t significant to reference their emotional state as causational to their outburst, for it can simply be a primal response to an extreme experience resulting in, by direct correlation, an extreme reaction.  

The child hasn’t experienced many restaurants, nor many planes in their short lifetime, and so the stimulus that is scratching at their brains starts to pierce the tissue and they can do nothing but exhibit terror. They react fundamentally by instinct. Wailing bloody murder seems to them the only feasible response to their stimuli. 

They reach for their mothers who have been distilled in complimentary pinot noir, clawing at a sense of security which has been tantalized by the dim lighting, the shift in cabin air pressure.

From the next aisle over, I watch in awe as I swallow a pill that will cancel out my equilibrium altogether, something those small children are so desperate to master, in hopes that it will revert my primal responses and sedate me.

I only cry when I want to clear the lucidity.

The little pill’s goal, as it traverses my esophagus and finds land ahoy in my stomach lining, is to bridge the gap in between my neurons that recycle serotonin too quickly. I was explained this around the age of fifteen while sat on a black leather couch and facing a beige wall, desperately avoiding the psychiatrist’s sterile gaze which, once finally met, revealed nothing other than the commonality between me and him: it was noon and we were both dying. Whether it was from existential dread or from the urge to go on a lunch break I am still uncertain, but when he spoke my brain produced a distant static, like I was recovering from a flash bang. Wading in fog, I stared at his computer without blinking during my diagnosis, shifting focus from one eye to the other in defiance. His screen had a reminder box flashing: Time to Stretch!

Stretching the temporal plane is what those little pills did to my brain. They were called to action when I experienced a primal reaction to an extreme situation, a literal shock to my neural system that shifted my equilibrium. 

As if, for instance, a figurative truck crashed into the retaining wall of my headspace. No, I seem to have those tenses wrong. It was a literal truck that crashed into the retaining wall of my headspace while I was sleeping in my room, triggering the figurative shock to my equilibrium, and so the little pill calvary was deployed. 

I was sent away from the needed repair, both physically to the integrity of the property and psychologically to the popped bubble wrap of my brain’s tranquility, and with some guidance from the University’s counseling department, I landed a three week stay at a hotel. 

I was not the average hotel inhibitor. I watched Mock-UN conference purveyors ask for popcorn at the front desk in the nighttime’s early hours, and I witnessed dealers of all sorts hide out in the corners of the lobby. I was spectating a world which I could only pass through, while the inhibitors of the hotel experienced a world that seemed permanent: their own limiting infinity. 

Careful watchers and light sleepers of the hotel ate breakfast in the morning, whereas city dwellers and movie lovers gathered their things to build a nest in their rooms towards the fall of evening. I was neither of these definitions, as I stole single-use cereal boxes in the daytime and locked my door at night. The “do-not-disturb” placard swung ambivalently from the door handle so that I could watch the moonlight flicker through the stark eucalyptus trees without disturbance. When the static of a near-mute television lulled me close to slumber, I would close my eyes and try to compartmentalize the sound of tires screeching into a warm faint breeze. 

The little pill calvary took their effects shortly after my entering the hotel wing as a high roller. I wouldn’t have been able to operate a moving vehicle with the drugs in my system,