Answers

Why am I so crazy?

I ask everyone and no one knows

Or maybe they just don’t want to tell me

“I can take it!” I yell from the ceiling

Why am I so crazy

My psychiatrist clicks out a prescription for some kind of med to be sent to the pharmacy at the end of the street

Where the pharmacist knows me by name and exactly where the plastic bag with my new bottle swings from the rack

Like a translucent bat that swallowed my self-care and doesn’t mind the fluorescent lights

“What is wrong with me?”

I cry and coo and try to exclaim without sounding so crazy that the prescription becomes a trip to the hospital

My psychiatrist blinks and my pharmacist clinks pills into a plastic cylinder

They say to me, “have a nice day”

Why am I so crazy?

I ask my mom and my dad and we look at our gnarled family tree where the roots are solid but the branches are thin

Mental illness is our pollen, sampled from ancestors across the canopy, then sprinkled generously on flower after flower of fucking crazy

Kallems

and

Shelmandines

and

Oppenheims

and

Kerrs

And all those other decaying names that I can’t recall or maybe I never knew

I wish I could conjure up my dead grandparents to ask them why they were crazy and why they slipped pollinated poison into my skull where it blooms in my brain and itches my eyeballs

An allergy to my family

Why am I so crazy?

One sister texts me back with emojis and empathy and concern and the distance from Arlington to Pittsburgh

One sister doesn’t answer my calls but she tries so hard to treat me kind even though I make her crazy

But she doesn’t know why I am a lunatic, she just knows that I take up a lot of time

They both do

Why am I so crazy?

My husband smiles soft and hears my hands, holds my heart, keeps me from running out the front door looking for an explanation in the middle of the street

“Why am I like this?”

I say to his mouth and watch his words struggle to fall out

He has no answers just blind reassurance in the shape of, “you’re going to be ok”

Like I would believe it

Why am I so crazy?

The dogs don’t know

The cats don’t know

The rabbit that lives under our porch doesn’t give a shit

And the back alley has rats that could care less

Our neighbors have a garden next to our fence and the flowers freak me out with their wide petals and strong smells

And the fact that they trespass in our yard, teasing our dogs, and choking my air

They make me feel like a monster because all I want to do is rip them out of the ground since their only purpose is to huddle together and say, “I love you” or “I’m sorry”

And I don’t fucking care

I just want to know why I’m batshit

Why am I so crazy?

I can’t find answers engraved on my fingertips

I can’t find riddles on the soles of my feet

The ditch of my elbows are empty and the backs of my knees are cowards

I am covered in tattoos but they aren’t hieroglyphics, they’re just a collection of black and grey images

They’re blue prints of my body but all they map is pain and pleasure and the part of me that remembers how hurting can feel so good when you hate yourself

I walk down the street and people say, “nice ink” and I wince because the second my skin falls off no one will want to talk to me anymore

Why am I so crazy?

Everyone else knows what to do and who they are

Maybe they don’t know why they are this way or act this way, but they don’t care because they fit in

And I fucking fall out because I’m crazy and I can’t fix it

Because I don’t know why this is inside me

Or how to remove it

Everything festers when you’re fucking insane

Why am I so crazy?

My psychiatrist

My pharmacist

My parents

My sisters

My husband

The dogs, the cats, the rats, and that dumpy brown rabbit

The beheaded flowers

The people on the sidewalk

The woman at the bank

The cashier at Target

The guy chipping ham in the deli section

All look at me with suspicious white eyes and I don’t blame them because the frequency of my thoughts is too chaotic and crowded and cyclical and oh yeah

CRAZY

But I don’t know why