Me: A Montage
Home office shelves lined with tattered plastic-lined pages within bulky black notebook albums. They start before my birth, then document all stages of my awkward upbringing and beyond. Their bulging continues to expand with each passing year, as new memories compound old.  The images both fill and break my heart. 

i. my aunt who died last year, sunbathing in a 1960s swimsuit with her husband on vacation in Smithtown, Long Island, before his death nearly 50 years ago.  The image fuses joy and despair, nostalgia and grief, elegance and wistfulness. 

ii. our family home, Riverdale NY, designed from the ground up by my father. Pachysandra in the front, a swing set rising from woodchips in the back.

iii. a red bandana around his neck, our family dog Harry, all shaggy in his glory, 1980s, who came to us stray as we fed him a daily bowl of Cheerios. He came to live with us after my father cut him out of a rosebush.

iv. us, in our cul-de-sac, riding bikes and playing with the neighbor’s cat.  Serving up the pretend meal du jour from our life-sized playhouse next to the garage.

v. my immediate family:  me, my parents, and my sister on a European vacation in the early 90s.  My attention is drawn to my late father, who haunts the snapshot because he’s recently lost.  I think about how all our youth is also lost.  Any angst associated with growing up has long since passed, and now I am responsible for my own joy.  I am now the parent in the photos.

vi. New York City streets and our Toluca Lake kitchen.  My mother, uncle, and grandma at the table, much younger and all smiling.  Only my mother now remains, and she is frail and almost unrecognizable to me.  She’s still a blue-doe-eyed angel but it panics me that this portrait will soon contain the memories of three vanished and beloved ghosts.

vii. my children as infants.  Boundless hope, promise, and future on their cheerful grinning lips.  Gladness to know that this existed at one time, regret to know that life doesn’t turn out as expected and we can’t control its trajectory, no matter what the intentions and prayers, or how tremendous the desire.

Treatment Protocol
I’ll trade you your Lamictal for my Abilify
Status quo, we lay in bed all day
I manage to crack my eyes open, write an email, hop on Zoom
Obsessively critiquing my fat face and turkey neck
Oh, I’m probably the oldest one here, huh?
I too learn to live with this
I still can’t cast it all out, can’t make it small
I sit next to it on the couch,
I want to overdose it on thorns and venom
You can’t dull my shine
Because you are a part of it, the counter-facet, the darkness to my light
We live in the shadows
It can be beautiful here if and only if,
You ride the waves of the laughter, kiss the goblin on the Zoom screen, rejoice of what you’ve had.

Abilify
From the small plastic bottle, one tiny oblong pill

Eagerly swallowed each morning

As it dissolves it permits joy to reveal itself,

reintroducing sunlight onto a dark tableau.

Erica Stenta Willis is a Ventura County attorney specializing in representation of injured workers.  She is an emerging writer in several genres and her work has been published in Rundelania and The Poetry Cove.  She lives with her fiancé and terrier.