It is once again my bathroom. Upon seeing the fake granite splitting along the corner of the sink, I realize that it’s the one from 2014. As is usual here, I am startled by the immediacy with which the coldness of the tile infects my legs through my heels. It is dark but for the slab of light spilling out from under the door behind me. There is no color but a vignette of this hazy blue that melts away any reality that is not the rectangular platform around the sink, the awesome vastness of outer space in the mirror, and, most immediately among these stars, the space suit staring right back at me. Unmoving, the helmet is filled with a desperate consciousness­­—the visor uncomfortably black.

Space is frightening because there is either an absolute void or an overwhelming everything at the end of every ray outward that my eyesight follows. A yes or a no. There are no clouds to block my sight and protect me from this holy dichotomy. Maybe I should be thankful that the space man commands my focus instead of ruminating on whether my question has an answer that lives just behind the black curtain. Regardless, the space man is lost, untethered, and trapped in my mirror.

As I look at his hand, he looks at mine, and, curious about our trade, I reach my hand up to my face. I shouldn’t have been surprised to see the weathered glove of a space suit. Fingers curled, as if a waterfall could graciously drop from one knuckle to the next, I imagine that my hand exists under its covering. Now, I see the visor on my head fogging up in front of my face. I hear my own breath being exhaled from the space man across from me, and I understand my predicament. Either I am trapped in this suit or I am nothing but it. I don’t know which is worse.

The creeping cold disappears into a blue, lukewarm nothingness that tells me I will never see my body again.

Inside the mirror my reflection is now turned away, and my eyes are fixed on the pearl surface of the helmet’s backside, with the number “10” etched at the top, above the horizontal indentation. I want to slam my head into the mirror and crack open the visor along the pill’s equator and climb out of this monstrous body I swallow every morning at 8:30 a.m., but I’m afraid I’m too late. The space suit is my skin, and I am irreparably floating in space. Am I nothing but my eyes anymore?

I wake.

***

My head hurts. The side effects of stopping this damn drug loom over me as if to finally betray herself as an effective medication, as if to pathetically declare her existence in her dying breath. This ghost’s worst sin is her desperation, her greatest trick the implication that she was ever alive, protecting and vigilant. I dread the buzzing swarm that lies in wait for my surfacing from sleep every day. I dread the swarm shaking the oceans with such ferocity that I cannot help but wake up in my nightmare’s splash zone. In this purgatory between sleep and wake I fake my nostalgia for a time that did not exist: that time when Lexapro calmed me with equal intensity. The ghost embraces me like my mother does, leaving me with guilt only when I’m not around her. That guilt must mean something, right?

The ghost sighs and lets me sleep again. I have no choice but to wake up, anyway.

The air is much weightier now that I’ve stopped Lexapro, turning the pages of the seasons so quickly. But even now that I’ve opened the windows and the sun is out, I still find myself buried in these radiant and sticky shadows. And I have these new headaches, these new reminders that I am not as I once was, and that, maybe, gradually, my memories will not belong to me anymore.

So I make two hopeful guesses: (1) the headaches are because of the Lexapro withdrawals, and (2) the sadness is not. I felt no exoneration from this heavy air while on Lexapro for three years. Why should I give her credit now? She doesn’t deserve my anger. She certainly didn’t get any of my sympathies.

***

On the holy mountaintop Lexapro sat arrogantly and spouted her doctrine.

“The good is because of me, the bad is because of me. What choice do you have but to believe?”

I was unconvinced.

“So many of my devotees have reacted like you, and so many of them have been saved. What do you have to lose? Where else can you turn?”

She was right. I prayed to her in such desperation, and I got my fill. I question if she ever blessed me like the other believers. I felt no catharsis like they did. My frustration about her lack of holy powers did not warrant the terror I felt under my skin when considering leaving her divinity behind. But terror I feel. And so I am more damned than a heretic: I am a hypocrite.

In this blizzard of shadows, I want to cast off my jacket and throw off my gloves and run out of my shoes and stand bare with only what I was naturally meant to have. I want to keep clawing off my shirt and into my skin and into my fat and my muscle and bones. I don’t know when to stop. I don’t know where she ends and where I begin. I want to know who I am without her. She frowns from her throne: “I made you.” I am nothing but my eyes because Lexapro took my body.

I wake.

***

Is Lexapro my god? One of my gods? One of those almighties walking around in the clouds above, looking down with judgment? Those who assuage our fears about whether we’ll pass that test or whether we’ll make that interview on time or whether that kid in Gaza gets their head blown apart. If not for the wall of clouds resolutely blocking my view into the heavens, I would know. Are you there Lexapro? I wonder if the clouds know.

The clouds have a terrifying vantage, up high—they know where their god is, and, arrogantly, they obstruct us on the earth from searching any further. I wish I knew if they were protecting me from obtaining a gruesome knowledge. Or, if they were radiating a contentment so pure that I need not search any further, just the clouds were enough. Their god controls the day they dissolve, the day they coagulate, the day the rain terror on the ground, the day they caress us below. With such certainty in their god, do they feel happy when they rain (when they die)? From their home in the sky, the clouds can gaze at the infinities, but they always choose to look right back at us.

When I reaffirm the indents on my pillow, clutching, doomscrolling memories in my mind’s theater, I ask if my leaving Lexapro caused this. When my heart gallops around me with such speed that I am trapped inside its path, I ask again. The ups and downs of my life might all be attributed to the serotonin reuptake inside my brain. Either my happiness was a synthetic illusion, or I am wholly alone and without control in my pursuit of relief. I don’t want the answer, so I don’t ask the clouds. I’m not sure they would reply, anyway.

Before, when I had more faith (if there is such a concept as more or less faith), I performed my daily prayer that any other astute follower does. I took my 10 milligrams and fucked off. And the empiricists show that at a statistically significant level, Lexapro treats symptoms of depression and anxiety. This is the character of my religion. Our belief lies in the lab.

When I was a believer, I allowed my god some leniency. Of course, it would be no surprise that my Lexapro would overlook me at times while tending to the river of tragedy flooding the earth. Lexapro must get to the most desperate people first—she has a triage section outside the holy throne. One day she will show me to my salvation. Another kid gets blown up. They must really need Lexapro.

My impatience led me to the clouds. It was only when the clouds showed me the extent of their omniscience did I start to appreciate their companionship. They are present in the airs, through the waterfalls, along the creeks, and in the tears on my face that wash out the emotion inside me. Again and again the clouds tend to me and it is Lexapro that I thank. Again still, the clouds condense from the tears of those who failed their test and those that missed their interview and those that saw their child bombed in front of them. The clouds are always above, always throughout, and yet I pray to the gods on top of them to give me peace. I don’t deserve their compassion. But I get it anyways.

Always I find myself rushing into the arms of a new god, with the ghost of my deserted faith relieved that I have targeted a new recipient for my doubt. I want to soar into the clouds and hug the big white pill that looks out for us all. I clutch and I claw and I pray into her. I so firmly doubt my religion yet so firmly cling to god because she blesses me with tears every time I think: was I a good kid? My god, in whatever form, blesses me with tears to remind me that my memories are real. That my guilt is real. Deep within me are my tears that run outside and whisper into my ear. I remember, they say. I wish I knew which god to thank.

Hari Venkat works on economics research in Arkansas and has a degree in math. He was raised in Alabama but feels that home is always where he just moved from, which, at this point, is Chicago. He lives with his current foster cat and the boxes he hasn’t unpacked yet.