【☆】★ 𝔐𝔶 𝔇𝔬𝔲𝔟𝔩𝔢-𝔈𝔡𝔤𝔢𝔡 ℭ𝔞𝔭𝔰𝔲𝔩𝔢 ★【☆】

Lucy Geldziler

Some days when I wake up, I can only be certain it’s a weekday when I look out my window and see the children at the school next to me playing outside.

I am relieved to at least be waking up to a familiar skyline, fully-clothed, nestled safely on top off the half-torn off sheets that I seem to either always be conveniently too busy to fix—that or drunkenly stumbling into bed—not caring enough to fix them or acknowledge the fact that they were once much more resemblant of a cerulean than a navy.

Vomit is crusted in the seams of my see-through pants. I know the pungency of it all too well.

A fresh blister bubbles on my wrist, alongside the collection of surviving traces of Marlboro Reds from the past. I’m starting to think I wasn’t playing dress-up when I was Mia Wallace for Halloween.

Instinctually, I reached for my phone. At just about 6 ounces, the weight of its shackles was more than could be quantified.

I look at the logo of an apple on the back, and for the first time I notice the bite taken out of it. Was it the first time I noticed it or just the first time it resonated with me? It became evident that this little box in my hand is my forbidden fruit. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates exchanged the prelapsarian appeal of Silly Bandz and communion dresses with sexual trauma and dilated pupils. The bittersweet revelation of my true age adds to the intoxicating lore that is my life. I brace myself for the chaos from the night before that lies behind facial recognition.

It’s worse than expected, but it’s all for the plot, right?

My mother attempts to call me and I send her to voicemail—preoccupied with trying to identify each mystery stain on the once-cerulean comforter that was draped over me. She sends me a text, saying she was calling to ask if I’m out of my lithium yet.

Lithium.

Nestled inside of the pink and white capsule is the stability that I fear 

The normalcy that I oppose

The consistency that I dread

I always had trouble opening those child proof bottles

I do not want to be like the child proof bottles—

Hard for others to crack open

I am a screw top—

The label on the bottle half torn off so you can’t see who it originally belonged to

The capsules inside—a miscellany of different letters, numbers, shapes, and sizes

Unpredictable, emotional

The highs are intoxicatingly high and the lows are agonizingly low

My ability to feel—though deemed a diagnostic weakness—I consider a strength

I don't have a case on my phone for the same reason. If you look closely, you’ll can even see all these cracks on the back. “To remain tender is a gift,” I tell myself.

My emotional state is but a candle in the wind

I have always lived violently—

Finding myself either begging my eyelids to close or having to nail them open

Confiding in my once-cerulean comforter or not having felt its weight in days

I’ve had days my fingers left an imprint in my hair when I stroked it because opening the shower curtain was a month’s worth of work

And I’ve had days where I’ve had to check if my feet were still on because I made myself too occupied to sit down even for the length of a TV commercial

They say “the pen is mightier than the sword”, but I think the pen is mightier than the capsule too.

Chaos is a friend of mine

I had lived a thousand lives before I was even old enough to vote 

I have flirted with death my whole life—sometimes on purpose and sometimes by accident.

I’ve cheated death many times—sometimes mad when I came out alive.

It’s a miracle my heart still beats

It must have been all the ekgs

My hamartia is that I think too much and not enough

I have known crutches, but I have never known balance

I have known court, but I have never known order

I have known pills, but I have never known stability

Nothing satisfies me

Nothing consoles me

Even every meal tastes like regret

It was William Wordsworth who said “your mind is a garden and your thoughts are the seeds”, but easy for him to say—he was alive when lobotomies were normalized and accessible.

My mind is a jungle and my thoughts are invasive species. My mind is not a fenced-in bed in my mother’s backyard in the New Jersey suburbs, and my thoughts are not seeds of alfalfa sprouts and marigolds. My mind is the Amazon Rainforest and my thoughts are killer bees, spotted lantern flies, and invasive plant species that cannot be watered with the hose in your backyard but vodka shooters I unbuttoned two buttons on my shirt and smiled wide and long at the bodega worker for. My stream of consciousness is the Amazon River that runs through the forest, pervaded by the aforementioned invasive species. Trees are always falling in the forest, and when there’s nobody around to hear them make a sound, I water them with 80 proof and ironically enough, they stop falling…until the morning time that is—when I am greeted by the same spotted lantern flies and a once-cerulean comforter.

Lucy Geldziler is a New York-based multi-hyphenate artist. At 21 years old, she is a writer (of articles, poetry, and prose, and for screen)-actor-nightlife host-producer-dancer-creative d*rector-m*del-will do whatever you want her to do on a film set if it means she gets to be on it-and was not joking when she said “multi-hyphenate.” Lucy can often be spotted dancing on elevated surfaces at parties or at poetry readings where she shares sometimes depressing poems about the depths of her lore—which only God, her mother, and her notes app (the holy trinity) know the full extent of. She’s a huge fan of psychological thriller movies, books by tortured women, and that genre of lengthy Slavic novels with morally-conflicted main characters. She’s a certified forklift operator, youngest sibling, lefty, create mode philosopher, former chinchilla owner, and has been described as “girl funny,” “a walking NYC rolodex,” the Joan Didion of Instagram,” and deleted her Substack once her grandparents started following it, but you can still follow her on Instagram @Leg5 if you want to see what she’s up to, work together, or confess your love to her in the DMs.