Odes to Lithium

by Shira Erlichman

For a week and a half, for six hours a day, I am a body in a chair listening and talking with other bodies in chairs. I don’t cry. Not for myself. At least, not here. But I do cry for others whose stories undo my sense of capital J Justice. In all their stories there is a common thread: someone didn’t listen. Sometimes it is a brother, or a wife, sometimes it is a mother. • On my morning walks to the hospital I am shellacked in beauty. Red leaves falter like prayer flags on the branch. Yellow leaves grin their good yellow teeth. When I start to think of my family, my father stewing somewhere in evergreen sweatpants and a private, heavy rage, or my brother ignoring his feelings, moving like a bolt of brunette lightning through his days, or most vividly, my mother, guilt eating her heart like a silkworm on the vine, I practice a Cognitive Behavioral Exercise the Group Therapist taught us. It’s simple and it works: notice the colors around you. In ROYGBIV order. This will reroute your brain away from the emotional center, where mother happens, toward the logical center, where math happens. • Red: leaves, stoplight, jacket on a woman down the path, red fleck of paint on my brown boots. Orange is how headlights look when they’re turned off midday; where are these cars going? To work? To family? Orange is a tree shaking its arms like a bad dancer. Orange is the sign advertising a new TV show, one lost orange glove near the bus stop bench. Yellow, slutty tree, oh cerebellum, oh L...