Supermarket(69)

Frank grabbed the gun, turned back, and fired. The burning sensation radiated through my arm. I looked down. Blood started to trickle out of my shoulder.

“You shot me?”

“Yeah, I guess I did, haha,” Frank replied.

I always imagined what it would feel like to be shot, and the feeling was . . . like nothing I had ever felt. It felt like someone had cut me open and stuck a fiery piece of coal deep inside me.

“Well, old friend,” said Frank, raising the gun to my head. “Looks like this is the end of the line.”

I looked down the barrel of the gun. Just as Frank pulled the trigger, Mia came from behind him, pushing the gun from his grip and sending it skidding under the aisle’s shelving units. With my good arm, I grabbed Frank by his shirt. We struggled and struggled.

How do I kill a man who doesn’t exist? A man who lives only in my head?

He threw punches but couldn’t land a swing from the angle I had him at, so he stopped swinging and quickly did something I wish I had seen coming. He stuck his middle finger in front of my face.

“Fuck yoooouuuuuuu!” he yelled. He pressed his middle finger deep inside the wound.

The pain was agonizing. If the initial feeling of being shot was the worst pain I’d ever experienced, this was even worse because the shock had worn off. I was experiencing Every. Single. Moment.

And even worse than the pain Frank had inflicted? Knowing there was no Frank. Not really, anyway. And it was just me, gutting myself all alone there in aisle nine, while poor Mia watched the man she loved fall apart.

I was losing. After all this, I couldn’t believe the main character of a fictional book I wrote . . . was in the middle of brutally murdering me. He pulled his finger from the wound and grabbed my brown coat by the zipper, pulling me closer, ready to punch me in my already broken nose. I could see his hand, stained in my blood, coming in.

This was it, I could feel it. This next blow would end it. I had to do something! As he cocked his arm back for the final blow, I screamed and . . . punched him back with everything I had. The punch would have knocked him down, but he was still holding on to my jacket.

As he began to fall, he pulled on the jacket, flinging it upward. The upward inertia projected the contents of my right pocket into the air.

It was like slow motion, watching them fall to the ground. Frank leaning to the left, trying to regain his balance, trying to find his footing.

It was the pills. Hundreds of them.

For those of you who don’t know, sanity is really just a state of mind . . . quite literally. You see, depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia are rooted in a chemical imbalance in the brain. Doctors often prescribe medication to correct the chemical equilibrium. Thus, in turn, they have a positive effect on the body. Take, for example, the term self-medication. With drugs and alcohol, people self-medicate to live in a state of euphoria, abusing the chemicals that force endorphins and serotonin to the brain. However, we aren’t supposed to be in this mental state all the time. And when the high is over, we come down and crash. This is why withdrawal plays a huge part in addicts never getting clean—they are running from the problems in their lives that make them sad or depressed. They are finding solace in substances. But the truth is, if they just dealt with their issues in the first place, then they wouldn’t need to self-medicate. Now, this is more applicable to anxiety and depression. When we get into more severe mental health issues such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, this is where doctors’ prescriptions really can help a patient. Due to my paranoia and disgust for ingesting pills, I never took the ones I should have. That not only kept Frank alive, but fueled the delusion I was living in.

How do you kill a man who only exists in your head? How do you kill a chemical deficiency in the brain?

Hundreds of Xanax, lithium, Seroquel, Lexapro, and Risperdal hit the floor. They bounced like Skittles some child dropped by mistake. All the afternoons at Mayberry, when Ann would hand me my pills, all those days, came pouring out onto the floor. And with that, in the blink of an eye, everything went from slow-motion to real time.

“Oh, shit!” Frank yelled as he began to slip, doing everything he could to catch his balance. The full force of the left side of his forehead smacked against the ground, making a noise I could only describe as slamming a raw piece of steak on a marble floor.

As he rolled over, pieces of his skull were exposed, crumbling into his mouth. I could see a small amount of brain matter coming out of his head. Then suddenly . . .

I was where he lay. I saw what he saw, I felt what he felt. Fading, he backed himself up against the shelf, propping his back against it like a pillow. Seeing from his eyes, from his point of view, I felt myself separating from his body. I began to stand, and as I did, I felt myself split in two.

Much like the night in my apartment, when I made Frank real to finish my book by any means necessary, I was splitting in two.

As I rose to my feet, I felt numb. I turned around and there was Frank on the floor. Gasping for air.

How do you kill a man who doesn’t exist?

It was the pills. The same pills I’d been stowing away in my pocket for the last two years. The pills that were meant to rid my brain of the chemical imbalance did just that, only from the outside. When Frank slipped and hit his head, I slipped and hit my head. The fall ended in extreme blunt trauma. It was such an enormous blow that the chemicals in my brain balanced out in real time. My whole perspective shifted. My vision crackled, shook, trembled. It then tunneled and finally locked into focus. I was then lifted up from out of my body. From high above I peered down onto my dying self. Suspended in time. At that moment, out of my body, I felt like I could see everything. Not just the entire store below me, but my entire life. The past, the present, the future. I felt embraced by a kind of tranquil serenity. Was this what death felt like? As soon as the moment came, it went, and I was shot back into my corporeal self. My entire frame was reanimated. I groggily lifted my head from the ground. I felt sublime, lucid, crystal clear. I felt terrified and torn. Happy and ecstatic. All at once.