Pretty Little Brain by Noah Bracale

Pretty Little Brain

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Noah Bracale

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Sertraline, Melatonin, Magnesium supplements, amphetamine-dextroamphetamine, Priadel, aripiprazole, Buspirone, Bupropion, Hydroxyzine pamoate, Escitalopram, Mirtazapine, Venlafaxine, Fluoxetine, Paroxetine, Lorazepam, Trazodone 

My bedsheets smell like tequila, and I’m wrapped around myself. Wallet, phone, keys, cigarettes, lighter shoved under my pillow. There’s blood too—on my bedsheets. Blotted in the same pattern that is carved across my back.

I’ve been given this pretty little brain, and I am determined to live through it.  

Psycho-therapy, Al-anon meetings, EMDR, TRE, DBT, CBT, Puppets? At one point? Sandboxes, 72 hour mandatory stay. It costs $50,000 to go to a ranch and pet a horse, and I wish I had the money to go to it and fix me. I’m not sure it even would.  

I was eight years old when I first remember hurting myself. Truly hurting myself.  

I tried to break my own hand. I took one of my father’s ten pound weights and slammed it over my left hand over 400 times. I only know this number because I counted. I was punishing myself for something, the same thing I still punish myself now for—and it is completely elusive to me.  

Vodka, Tequila, Green apple Tennessee Whiskey, Weed, Molly, Mushrooms, LSD, Xanax, Cocaine (once on my gums), Adderall crushed and snorted in a hotel bathroom, Black Marlboro shorts (Cowboy killers,) All of them—mixed together.  

I came up with shorthands, comical ones: ones that let my buddies know that something was going wrong. I’d bray like a donkey when my brain began to get loud—when I couldn’t find the words to say “I’m seeing that memory again.” “My hands have gone numb.” “I’m stuck in a loop—I can’t find my way out.”  

They all reacted different. Aidan was the first to hear it. Diego knew my pride—how to distract me, to ground me, to ease me back to earth without doubling my shame. Dom would ask before he held me, and then he’d hold me. Alaska knew instinctively to check what was wrong.  

Diego, Aidan, Dom, Alaska. 

There’s this story I tell sometimes, almost like an apology—or some kind of explanation to my friends and lovers who had stayed up with me through all of the nights I cannot sleep. 

Awoken from nightmares, tortured by thought. The nights that my safety plan deems a babysitter necessary. They’d sit with me, and I’d tell them: 

“Sometimes, I think, before I came here, I had a conversation with God. And he told me that he’d make a deal with me. He told me that I would come back, and I was going to suffer, really suffer. But all of that suffering was going to be worth it because I would get ‘this’ in return.”  

I’m sure I said to them, “Maybe it’s you. He told me that there would be rape, and torture, and pain. But at the end of it, there would be you. You are God's apology to me.”  

General Anxiety Disorder, Major Depressive Disorder, Panic Disorder, Agoraphobia, Complex 

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Dissociative Identity Disorder, 

Substance Abuse Disorder, Bipolar Depressive, Borderline Personality Disorder  

Treatment Resistant.  

I was told that, 

‘Whatever you have—it may be time to consider that it is treatment resistant.’ That maybe there would be no stop to it.  

I was given choices no kid should have ever had to make. I was given memories that will never find their way into an essay. I was given the role of a sacrificial lamb who is now being asked to reply to two of my classmates’ discussion board posts. I was given a pretty little brain.   

And he is kind, lord. And he is empathetic, and patient. He is merciful. He is gentle, and he tries because he knows it is important. And he was given a pretty little brain.  ƒ

He was given a pretty little brain with no cure.  

Things That Fade by Aditi Ghosh

    Aditi Ghosh: Things That Fade

1. Daisies on a gold chain. Provenance: exact details forgotten, but most likely Francesca’s, La Encantada, 2905 E Skyline Dr #143, as one of a two or three part sale deal. In my first year of college, I wore it nearly every day, small daisies strung around my neck, a sort-of matching set of daisies on my ears. The chain, once gold, has since darkened into a warm copper, worn down by the oxidation, the time, the love. 

2. Adjustable rings, one embedded with a (likely fake) pink stone. A gift from my mother. Provenance prior to gifting: Unknown. I stopped wearing these not because of the tarnishing, but because they hurt. The corners on the adjustable ends are sharp. With fingers clasped around a pencil, or around themselves into fists, the metal bites, digging traces into the soft skin at the corners of my palm. There are no cuts; still, under running water, the edges of my fingers sting, slightly blue, with all the annoyance of the smallest paper cut, invisible until noticed, then unable to be ignored. 

3. Stylized silver rings. Provenance: two different sales at pop-up tents on the University mall. After a few uses, the salt in the sweat between the rings and my fingers started to eat away at the metal, staining it. Now, they’re shaded all around, not quite tarnished, not to the point of ruin. Mixed-metal, perhaps, liminal. Not quite silver, not quite gold. 

4. Sterling silver and turquoise linked bracelet. Provenance: Arequipa, Peru. This one is, admittedly, completely my fault. Over the summer, I left it in a bag with a tarnished necklace, and by the time I opened it back up again, the pristine silver had turned dull and grey-ish, brown-ish, black-ish, a clouded film at the edges, blurring into the bright turquoise. Ruined not by time or love, but by neglect, quieter, final, a kind of damage all its own.


 

5. The only remaining ring in the first set of jewelry I ever bought for myself. Provenance: Claire’s, Outlets North Phoenix, 4250 W Anthem Way. Senior year of high school, a quick stop off the highway on the way to the senior band trip to Disneyland. Bought while waiting for one of our drum majors to get his ears pierced for fun. On impulse, I grabbed the pack off the shelf, gold-ish, coughed up 15 dollars for them, and walked back out into the cold, December evening air.

I lost one ring the next morning in San Diego, stolen by the surf, salt-tongues sliding the thing off of my index finger and swallowing it down into the belly of the ocean. The rest tarnished in barely a month. They were probably gold-tone: made of a base metal, only plated to look like gold. Underneath, after my skin and sweat had eaten away the plating, they were copper-ish, rough, and left an embarrassing ring of blue at the base of each of my fingers. 

This one used to be the simplest of the set: gold all around, a single, uninterrupted band. Now, it is eaten away, chipped, its core rough and exposed. 

Two unspoken, broken promises: I never wore the rings again. He never got his ears pierced.  

Campus Flowers by Hanna Wilkens

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Campus Flowers

Hanna Wilkens

A few weeks ago I was studying late at the library and decided I needed a break. It was nearly 10pm, and the dense heat of early September had loosened and made way for a warm, comfortable 80 degrees. It’s my favorite time to walk around campus—the freshman skittering around in going out clothes, headed to University with fake IDs, feeling jittery with excitement and rebellion. Leisure bike rides and walks and a few students throwing a frisbee back and forth. I headed aimlessly back to my old dorm on Highland Ave, the walk still engraved in me although I haven’t lived there in two years. Walking through the pathway between dorm buildings, I looked up at my old window. I wondered who lived there now. If they were adjusting alright. I hope they’re adjusting alright. I turned to look at the Hibiscus plant growing in direct view of my old window. It’s bright purple petals folding inward on one another. I used to find such comfort in them. Those first months away from home, I’d look out at the flowers when I was feeling lonely and tell myself they were a sign. A sign that I was in the right place. 

That year I’d taken a liking to using flowers as indications that I was making the right choices. It started with a visit to Arizona my senior year of high school. My favorite flowers are poppies, although I rarely see them in real life. We used to have a big painting of them hanging outside my childhood bedroom and I suppose I’ve always associated them with home. Then, somewhere on the highway between Phoenix and Tucson, I spotted them, sprouting along the black tar in daring patches of gold. It felt like a message.

The hibiscus flowers, though, belong to a different memory. My grandfather used to grow them in his garden in Florida, and every time I visited he’d pick one of the flowers and place it behind my ear, and I’d wear it there for the rest of the trip. The last time I saw him he picked two: one for behind my ear, and one that he placed on the dash of our rental car before we left. It wasn’t until we were pulling out of the driveway that I noticed it, and I turned around to wave goodbye to him. That was the last time I ever saw him. Later, staring at the hibiscus outside my dorm window, I liked to think that the flowers were a gift from him. A symbol that I was doing the right thing—that I was moving forward and making a life of my own.

That night, walking around campus, I picked one of the hibiscus flowers and tucked it behind my ear. Then I proceeded to walk all around the south side of Old Main, pocketing flowers in my jeans. When I got home I pressed them in a book and later made them into cards I plan to give to my friends and family on their birthdays. Maybe for them, the flowers will mean something too.

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