Because Thanksgiving somehow marks the start of the new year for me, I spent part of the day doing what people do as they move from the old year to the new one: creating a schedule for the thirty-three vitamins and supplements and five medications I take.

Half of what I take interacts with one or more of the other things I take, so putting this schedule together feels like getting a poetry manuscript in the right order. It’s also like doing calculus, which I vaguely remember. Math was always fun and games for me until the answer invariably came out wrong and I had to start all over.

I have diagrams with things that are crossed out, things I’ve moved multiple times, pictures I’ve drawn of pills fighting with each other, little swords in their little pill hands. My floor, covered in sticky notes, has been transformed into a pink-paper sea of faded, flattened blossoms, each a failed attempt to meet every substance’s needs without compromising any other substance’s needs or my needs, which is the whole point of this undertaking. I have to be careful about how and when and why I introduce new substances to the watery admixture that is me.

I have a bunch of tabs about chemical interactions open on my computer. I have a brand-new Trello board full of notes. I’m very close to writing a raggedy-edged poem ranting about pills and people in the style of Charles Bukowski.

The Trello board has a white-stucco background depicting stairs leading to a colonnade whose immersive columns rise all around me, or so it seems, like bleached bones. I chose the photo for all my boards related to my health. It makes me feel safe somehow, like I’m inside my own body, which is at once dead and also impenetrably strong. It’s almost like one of the liminal spaces in my dreams, but I never futz with pills in my dreams or boluses I empty under my tongue or sticky fluid made from other people’s plasma that I absorb under the skin through needles I jab into my upper arms. I’m too busy running in my dreams or flying or falling. Unless I’m in the grotto. I could stay in the grotto forever, and I will if we get to choose where we go next, once the pills stop working and the cathedral of the body collapses and someone burns me like a banned book, like a bra, or maybe like a flag.