Reel Five: What the Body Kept

The transmission for this chapter — the dated, physically describable artifact the record requires before any argument is permitted — is a printed medication list with my name typed at the top. Nine entries. Prazosin for the nightmares. Trazodone because sleep had stopped happening on its own. Venlafaxine, Lurasidone, Auvelity, Adderall, Hydroxyzine, Propranolol, and the one you hope you never need, Alprazolam, capped at twenty a month so the system itself does not let you lean on it too hard. A printout like this is a kind of artifact the digital present keeps trying to replace with a dashboard, a wellness app, a sleep score — something that renders the body legible in real time. Mine arrived the old way: a doctor's office, a printer, a stapled page I folded and put in my pocket like a verdict.

I have REM Sleep Disorder — the muscle paralysis that is supposed to accompany dreaming sleep does not fully occur, so the body moves, speaks, acts out what the mind is processing, and in the morning none of it is remembered except the exhaustion. Clinicians will tell you it is highly synonymous with trauma and that it raises the risk of Parkinson's later. What they will not tell you, because it is not their job, is what went into a body to produce the condition in the first place. That part is testimony — a formal account of what happened, given because the person who lived it is the only one positioned to give it — and testimony is mine to enter, not theirs.

I think about when the dark became unsafe. I do not have a single answer. I have a timeline: a childhood with my father in the house but without the closeness I needed from him, and with some of my uncles incarcerated or struggling with addiction; a string of schools that reset every social landscape I had just started to learn; the specific loneliness of an only child with no one to watch navigate the world ahead of him. None of that exists anywhere as a continuous record — no app logged it, no system flagged it as it accumulated. The occupying force here is not a government. It is the simple absence of any infrastructure, in that era, built to preserve a slow accumulation of harm in a form other than a nervous system that eventually stops sleeping correctly. The body became the only archive. It is not a reliable one. It keeps the feeling with perfect fidelity and the facts with almost none.

I was raised on one model of strength — the kind that requires invulnerability, that says handle it, compartmentalize it, figure it out alone, and never let anyone see the receipts. That model has a cost that does not show up for years, until the sleep breaks and a doctor hands you a printout and you count to nine. I am writing from the space between that inherited model and whatever comes after it — fluent in the generation that was taught to carry everything silently, native to neither that silence nor the newer vocabulary that makes a man naming nine prescriptions sound unremarkable. I chose the prescription pad over the performance of fine. I am still finding out what it costs to say that plainly.

The list is not the story. The list is what the story cost, and I am still paying it, and I am still here. I do not know what it means that a piece of paper with nine drug names on it is, right now, the most complete surviving account of what accumulated in me across three decades. I know that I would rather it exist than not. I know that counting to nine does not feel like closure. It feels like a number I am still sitting with, on a Tuesday, waiting to find out if it is finished changing.