“We can’t get your medicine,” the pharmacist had said. That was all.  But I was panicked.  When you have schizophrenia, simply trying a new medicine could result in months and months of failures.  Hadn’t my whole life been a big enough failure without this added stress?  All first-generation anti-psychotics were in a shortage status. The FDA’s simple and very helpful reason was listed as “other” on their website.

After trying medicines that didn’t work well, I had fallen, as I knew I would, into a state of psychosis—free falling with no end in sight as my therapist demanded that I stay on a medicine for several weeks before I tried a new one.  “We will be homeless if I continue not to work,” my husband, Destry, had told my therapist.  He had been staying home with me because I was “a danger to myself and others.”

After about a month, Des had to go out on the road again, trucking. Taking me with him would be muy, muy stressful, but with a heart of gold, and a resolution to get through difficult times most men don’t possess, he packed my things, and we were off.

At the end of the first week, we had enough money to either get a cheap motel room or go to the giant McKay’s used bookstore in Tennessee. He needed more CDs. I was a former children’s librarian so of course I needed more children’s picture books.

After we left, we held hands and laughed, gleeful over our reckless spending, which would result in us spending the night in the truck at a truck stop. As we rode that night down the highway, I would read aloud my children’s books, in my funny voices, pausing each time the light proved too dim, waiting for the next illuminated billboard or streetlight to brighten the cab of the truck well enough for me to continue reading.  Destry nodded and laughed at all of the appropriate places like he was my typical six to eight-year-old audience, instead of a 52 year old man, broke and far from home with his mentally ill wife who was very slowly bouncing back from a psychotic break.

We continued that way for what seemed like hours, him healing me the best way he knew how—as the night lights played fade and flicker, like a dying star, and somewhere ahead of us down that lonesome highway in a distant Universe—a galaxy was born.

Millie Sparks lives and works in Eastern North Carolina where she has been a librarian for the past 14 years. She has been published online in *Reedy Branch Review* and *Narrative Northeast. *She was first diagnosed with schizophrenia in her early forties and has been living a mostly normal life on medicine ever since.