CLIV. Part I: Serious about Serotonin-

I’m seriously starved of serotonin. I’m starved of that euphoric enigma that I would experience when entering a basement in Jackson Heights from which obnoxiously loud bhangra music is bound to be blaring. This lackluster feeling is  temporary, so there is no need for concern. I’m currently dwelling on the lining beneath that silver one, but a cloud is but a cloud. Fluffy and soft and fluid - It’s malleable beyond belief, just as our bodies are robust.

There are times, like today, when the sun is shone so brightly through the windows I would look out of as an Ivy-League obsessed youth filled with wanderlust, and I feel good. I’m smiling on the inside.

I have a content place - a “happy place” or a “happy” medium - which I have occupied on occasion. It comes and goes and mostly dwells in the future that could be - that will be. It dwells in hope, which I suppose is its own enigma: Time will pass eventually. This hurdle is quite tall, no doubt. The lack of exercise is making time seem endless despite its obvious finality.

Most of the time I am in a flux. I’m seesawing on a fulcrum that waddles between despair and dogmatism. The fulcrum itself is “determination,” personified. I am determined, no doubt, to walk the path ahead of me, faltering be damned. For my journey is crooked enough. I think I have acquired lessons and experiences that a successful person (evidently) is required to have in order to have some sort of perspective that qualifies them to have their memories and achievements bound, read, and distributed.

Where there is depth, there is reach.

I do not want to occupy the depths of hell so famed by Dante. After all, I was never one for classic reads. I fancy myself a hipster before the Bushwick Brooklynites replaced the borough’s once heard of baseball team, The Cyclones.

So here I stand, or rather sit, unabashedly basking in the glory of not having to travel underground or on buses. My bones wouldn’t be able to bear it. A slight jab, for me and all those who have traveled this hellish path, is the equivalent to a punch in the jocular. We would have the wind taken out of us - our breaths light and airy as opposed to a healthy person’s panting, heavy by nature.

It’s that feeling that some of us have been unlucky enough to experience. That feeling known as a “food coma.” Quite literally-speaking, a food coma is a severe drop in blood pressure that immediately results in blacking out after the consumption of caloric units. In other words, someone like me becomes weighed down by energy - caloric units - which for someone else - that “normal” person who I once was, or never really was, is known as fullness.

The concept of being ravenous, blacked out, awakened, and then adjusted to a new-found set of hunger pangs after weeks of no appetite, paves way for a fullness that never goes away. The appetite is lost while being built up.

You’re continuously sated, but never satisfied.

There is this disconnect between the mind and the body, one created by the self, that must now repair itself.
In actuality, I must repair it. I did the damage.
I must go past the fullness and learn to consume, to hydrate, to nourish myself - everyone else be damned. I must eat more than a grown man who works out. I must eat more than I want. It’s a race against the clock to recalibrate a never-fully calibrated metabolic clock.

The kitchen has now become my domain.
It’s not only the heart of the household’s dynamics, it’s also the grim reaper’s abode - the epicenter from which plans to annihilate all that is right and well for a family’s dynamics.

It just so happens that my kitchen has two elevated stools with cushioned chocolate-colored leather seats. They’re perfectly crafted for my once-fluid-filled feet that reminded me of the water-bags I would toss haphazardly with friends who were also neighbors.

I would run around all day, or roller-skate, bike ride and race on foot, hide and then would seek, before coming back inside for a bowl of pasta, a childhood favorite my mom would agree to make.

These leather seats protect my exposed frame to the wooden structure beneath it.These stools are, when not used, tucked neatly underneath a protruding slab of granite that looks out onto the living room/dining room of my youth.

I would always fear sitting here. Just like now, as I am typing this, my forearms and elbows are impolitely resting on the makeshift table/granite slab, especially during the act of eating. What if this huge piece of granite, weighing upwards of hundreds of pounds, were to succumb to the force of gravity and in turn the force vector from my arms - my own weight - only to crash on top of my legs?

Now I am not fearful of this happening. If I sit in a passenger seat, the light on the dashboard will still be flashing “Passenger Airbag Off.”

The smart hybrid of a car does not detect a human body present.

And yet I still exist. I’m here.