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Red Pill, White Pill.

The red pill is a capsule. The white one isn’t. The medicine has already been making me feel better. My friend, who just came back from his trip, said I sounded like a dead man. I wonder if the dead speak and if they truly sound like me.

My other friend says I sound better today. She said I spoke in TV static noises yesterday. As she said that, I recalled our family's gray TV box. It's not so old, but the noises make it seem old. I can't quite describe it. It fluctuated from a screech to a hush, like the sound when your ear is covered by your pillow and your blanket brushes against it.

This is a poor description. But I don't hear those sounds anymore. The chaotic world has become both noiseless and noisy. There's a lesson we are learning about how we need noise to function, as even a few moments of silence will make us reflect and ponder.

Even as I am writing this, I put on music so I won't feel myself thinking. It's easier to write this way—I feel like I am not thinking, yet I am writing as I think. A few songs, exactly twenty minutes, starting at 11:20 pm. I've got the formula down. It doesn’t feel genuine, but it feels better.

Better than the blog post of rainy reflections. I kept writing about how I couldn’t write. I had to sit and think and feel the frustration build. Now I hear the music, and my thoughts flow, yet I feel some justice is done to writing only if I have a eureka moment—a point where I reflect and discover something.

Even if the rest of the page isn’t as good, I suppose it depends on what you write for. This, I mindlessly write for the sake of consistency. I want to know that I can do it—keep going for a while before it or I break apart. It’s been a while, after all.

I swallow the pills. The red one lingers longer on my tongue, and the temptation to see the powder by pulling the cover apart is too much, so I resort to feeling what's inside. But the sensation of it melting on my tongue is unpleasant, so I put the white one next to it and swallow them both with some water.

Red pill or white pill? Prebiotic and antibiotic. I have to take both. I don’t have a choice. I want to get better.

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