One year in Beijing me & my roommate cycled through
every hospital in town for prescriptions. If I believed in god
I would’ve thanked it for decentralized patient databases.
Every night I would text four or five friends new visions
for the world. In my dreams I kept seeing blurry nurses &
horses with strange teeth. By May we had exhausted
most doctors and my roommate got scammed two hundred
bucks trying to buy Ritalin online. We crawled on all fours
combing for stray pills in the carpet, counted seven,
and gathered them all in a ceramic teapot. In September
I met a guy who said he knew a guy. During our lunch
he went to the bathroom five or six times, each time
coming back a little happier. Afterwards as we were biking
he kept looking at his own knuckles instead of the road.
Like they contained the answer to something. By some miracle
his bike was still going bone straight.