Feverish

There are empty bottles all over my bedroom, but that is okay, because they are tea and juice and water bottles. I have promised not to eat after dinner, but the rule is that I can have liquids, so I guzzle drinks and go through a pack of gum every night.

I have saved the bottles instead of throwing them away because I want to recycle them, because I want to be environmentally conscious. My recycle bin is full, and I should empty it, sorting white paper and mixed fiber and glasses, bottles, and cans into those bright blue containers. I think they chose bright blue because blue is such a reassuring color, it says “I are doing the right thing,” but because it is bright, I can feel as if I am cool as well. Bright blue is energetic, dynamic, but still secure, like the girl who pierced her eyebrows and is taking business classes, just in case.

I should empty it, but I am so busy, and so tired.

There are empty bottles all over my bedroom. Some of them are Gatorade and ginger ale, because those are the sort of things that you drink when you are throwing up constantly. You have to keep fluids in you so you don’t dehydrate. I know all about that sort of thing—I’m going to be a doctor. Then I will never get sick.

I have saved the bottles because I think that I will do something artistic with them later, like stringing them all onto a bottle tree. This is from a book that I read once, and I don’t remember anything besides the bottle tree and something about a trailer park. Flashes of memory like that are coming faster tonight than usual, and it is starting to bother me. A girl in a sweater. . . an empty chocolate box—though at least I know where that is from. Sometimes I worry that I might be going crazy, and then I wonder if anybody will notice. I talk nonsense most of the time as it is.

I should empty my head, but I am so busy, and so tired. There aren’t even bones in my head now, which is what I like best—now it’s all nerves and vertebral levels and branching nerves and origins and insertions and worse, gravity and relativity and stardust, which I shouldn’t be keeping in most accessible bits of memory, because they’re not helpful.

There are empty bottles sitting in my window, green ones to catch the light. I like glass and wood and things that I can touch. I am a tactile person, for my faults.

I have saved the world many times in my dreams, and destroyed it, too. I wonder how much white liberalism it will take to reclaim the rainforests, and wonder if I’ll ever admit that I am one of the league. And as silly as they (we) can be, aren’t rainforests good? Oxygen is a reformed killer, rust aside, and why do we keep trying to overwhelm it with that active murderer, carbon with its singular “o?” My application demands me to volunteer, to work in a lab, to be one thing and everything, as long as I conform to the form, which is wordplay that is not as clever as I think it is.

I should go to bed. My face is red and white, my fingers are shaking, and I’m starting to think that the cat sitting in my corner might be a hallucination after all. . .