Therapy Part 11 Just Take Your Medicine

The therapist says it softly

As if the words themselves

Might bruise me

Just take your medicine

But the sentence lands

Like a commandment

Like a stone dropped

Into a deep well

I’ve spent years avoiding

The room tilts

Not violently

Just enough

To remind me

That obedience and survival

Once meant the same thing

I hold the pill in my palm

It glows faintly

A small obedient moon

Waiting to be swallowed

But it’s never just a pill

It’s a doorway

A reckoning

A return to the body

I keep trying to outrun

The ghosts of the past

Gather at the edges

Watching

Whispering their old scripts

You don’t need this

You’re fine

You can handle it alone

But their voices

No longer fit me

They rattle like keys

To doors I’ve already locked

The therapist waits

Not pushing

Not pleading

Just holding the space

Where choice becomes truth

I lift the pill

My hand trembles

Not from fear of the medicine

But from the knowledge

That healing requires

A kind of surrender

I’ve never practiced well

Just take your medicine

The words echo

Not as an order

But as an invitation

To stay

To soften

To survive myself

I swallow

The room steadies

The ghosts retreat

And for a moment

A brief trembling moment

I feel the quiet click

Of something aligning

Inside my chest

Not peace

Not yet

But a beginning

I’m finally willing

To claim