moon therapy

neuroscience

I still remember when I picked out neuroscience as my major. I submitted a crisp white sheet to a woman wearing a blue pants suit and glossy pink lipstick, so pink that it hurt my eyes. I looked at posters of neon brains as I waited for the elevator down, and a quote caught my eye that said, "Neurons giveth and neurons taketh away."

I absolutely adore my major, but sometimes a little voice in my head tells me I picked it just so I can justify the total bullshit that love is. When my best friend cried over a boy that broke her heart last summer after they slept together in a desert hotel on vacation, I told her, "He's so full of crap. Guys brains don't mature till they're, like, 28."

When my roommate sobbed over the fact that her boyfriend would rather take shrooms with his greasy ass friends in their apartment that smells like cold sweat than spoon her and watch I Love Lucy I so desperately wanted to tell her that it wasn't her. It was him - the shrooms made him feel like he was floating in space. Like he was in some other world, dancing with angels. She couldn't compete with that, she was just a human being. There goes the brain, outdoing itself again. 

When my friend got cheated on by her boyfriend of three years she came to me physically clutching her heart and saying it ached behind her breastbone, like there was something drilling into it there. Asking me for Advil like it would fix things. Asking me if there was any Tito's still left in the fridge. 

"What does it feel like?" I asked blankly, which is bullshit, because I know that feeling inside and out. It feels like your body is trying to turn itself inside out and squeeze out the pain, but it can't find any, so it just keeps trying and trying to help you but it isn't. 

She tells me it feels like there were a pack of little birds trying to cut her heart into tiny pieces and steal it, squeezing out through her ribcage when they thought she wasn't looking. I told her that they call it heartbreak for a reason. Our brain actually thinks something bad is happening to us, and they signal pain to that area so our body can fix it. 

The joke's on the brain - the body has no clue what to do. So they just go back and forth, chasing neurons up the spine and down the spine, scratching their heads and shaking their fists at each other. 

"Fix whatever's hurting her!" The brain shouts down. "Somebody! Anybody! She's listening to Sleeping at Last again. It's bad."

The body rolls its eyes. "You're the one that won't let go of the memories. Maybe dump some of those out and she'd feel better."

The brain grits its teeth. "You know I can't do that. She went and made them. Now they're mine to keep." 

Neuroscience really is the coolest thing ever. I have learned so much about the brain, and so much about the mess going on in mine. But I have still not figured how long my brain is going to mistake me poring over memories for physical pain. I have still not figured out how to help my friends get over their heartaches. I have still not figured out how I've not done a single drug in my life yet I know exactly what it feels like to go into withdrawal.  

Okay #1 this is the most disorganized thing ever and I apologize and #2 literally all my poetry is sad but I promise I am NOT actually as sad as I sound in the poems omg 

plus this is from, like, 7 months ago and I wrote it in college oops