A/N : Just don't ask how I know so much about medication. Oh, yeah, and this is my first Fight Club fic. Please be nice. If you don't have anything good to say, don't say anything at all. Unless it'll help me.
Pills, Pills, Pills
You are not your Tylenol PM
You are not your Benadryl
You are not your Codeine
You are not your Prozac
The doctors said Tyler was gone. The pills made me believe it. And they had enough of them. "Have a pain in your stomach, Jack? Here's a pill." And they'd hand me a Codeine. "Depressed, Jack? Here, have a pill." And here they are, two Prozacs and a glass of cold water. If I have a cramp, they have a pill. They have a pill for everything here. Aspirins for the headaches we all get from the glaring white walls, Benadryl for the ones who get allergies on their infrequent trips outside. Some of my companions have stores of pills hidden under all the padding. They say that it's for when they've had enough. I've seen a few of the stocks, some as large as nearly a hundred pills. Mostly aspirin, a few Prozacs , and some yellow pills that I've never seen before.
You are not your padded walls
You are not your straightjacket
Oh wait. You are.
They tell me that Tyler was a figment of my imagination. Like they would know. These people diagnose without knowing anything. They think that they are Gods. And they took away the pills. The green ones, the pink ones, the white ones, the funny yellow ones which turned out to be a pain reliever for a personal part of the body. They want me to break away, to be dependent on myself, without drugs and medications, without the sleepy bliss that they give me. And so, Tyler is back. He was there all the time, watching, waiting for his chance in the arcane regions of my doped-out mind. The conversations are back, the plans, and the perversion. He imagines how to break out, and laughs at my attempts to fight him off. He seems to be back for good. He laughs a lot now. When I think about Marla, or my apartment, or that yin-yang coffee table that he blew up. That I blew up.
You are not your plastic spoon
You are not your cheap hospital underwear
You are not your fancy looking frozen dinner
He complains even more. About the clothes, the food, the male attendants. He talks about going back, about starting a new fight club. Nowadays I'm listening, not even trying to reason with the madman. Yes. Tyler is the madman.
The doctors came again today to view me through a mirror as I had a phone conversation with Marla. Yes, she still calls me. She wants to know when I'll be coming back. I never know, do I? Tyler got in his little say as well. As I said, the perversion is back. I even see him sometimes, pacing in my room or walking through the hall, flirting casually with the nurse. I honestly cannot believe he is me. I am not Tyler Durden. He is not me. And yet he came from my mind, spawned from my body. They have been giving me pills again. I have started my own stash behind the padding in the wall closest my bed.
You are not your leather suitcase
You are not your Armani suit
You are not your loser friends
Tyler's been good recently. He sits quietly in the corner of the room, and is completely complacent with the nurses and attendants. They have taken away the Prozac and given me a new drug, a less powerful antidepressant called Ambien, to ease me off the habit. We're leaving in two weeks.
My clothes have been returned to me. They are looser, and more faded than before. I wear the darkest ones I have. Marla is waiting for us at the entrance to the mental hospital, the nuthouse, the crazy cook. Or the exit, depending on your point of view. Glass half empty? Glass half full? All I say is, there's water in the glass. Big goddamn deal. Tyler laughs again, a rare thing. He's too quiet, too calculative. He's planning something.
You are not Afghanistan.
You are not The World Trade Center
But I am Osama Bin Laden.ยน
I missed a lot in there. The WTC bombing, the summer Olympics, Marla's wedding. Yes, the slut is married, to one of the people from "our'' little "tour groups". I'm not sleeping anymore. The insomnia started as soon as I got out. Watching infomercials for Bowflex and Nad's, seeing women in tiny bikinis that really don't turn me on. Getting off is harder and harder every day. Tyler helped yesterday, the first time I came in a month. That's when the problems started.
A/N: Wow. That went somewhere. Heh, first Fight Club fic! Yay! Anyway, reviews are much welcome and even more appreciated. Please sign them, I like reading fanfiction more than I like writing it! I think pretty much everyone is better than I am, although some people say it isn't true. I firmly hold my beliefs.
1: No. . .that was figurative. Tyler isn't Osama Bin Laden. You did know that Tyler was the one saying the "You are not. . .", right? The paragraphs are from Jack's POV. . .