Zoloft Two weeks into the bottle of pills, I'd remember exiting the one-hour lens grinder at Copley Square— the same store that years later would be blown back and blood-spattered by a backpack bomb at the marathon. But this was back when terror happened elsewhere. I walked out wearing the standard Boston graduate student wire-rims, my first-ever glasses, and saw little people in office tower windows working late under fluorescent lights. File cabinets with drawer seams blossomed wire bins, and little hands answered little black telephones, rested receivers on bloused shoulders— real as the tiny flushing toilets, the paneled wainscotting and armed candelabras I gasped at as a child in the miniature room at the Art Institute in Chicago. It was October and I could see the edges of everything—where the branches had been a blur of fire, now there were scalloped oak leaves, leathery maple five-points plain as on the Canadian flag. When the wind lifted the leaves the trees went pale, then dark again, in waves. Exhaling manholes, convenience store tiled with boxed cigarettes and gum, the BPL's forbidding fixtures lit to their razor tips and Trinity's windows holding individual panes of glass between bent metal like hosts in a monstrance. It was wonderful. It made me horribly sad. It was the same years later with the pills. As I walked across the field, the usual field, to the same river, I felt a little burst of joy when the sun cleared a cloud. It was fricking Christmas, and I was five years old! I laughed out loud, picked up my pace: the sun was shining on me, on the trees, on the whole damn world. It was exhilarating. And sad, that sham. Nothing had changed. Or I had. But who wants to be that kind of happy? The lenses, the doses. Nothing should be that easy.
Maggie Dietz, “Zoloft”
From That Kind of Happy