Years ago, I was in a relationship with Jeremy. He was fine, inoffensive, and didn’t have many quirks, save for the fact that he was a pill chewer. Instead of swallowing medication whole, he’d take the little capsules with their red hats and white bodies and lay them carefully on his tongue like an offering upon an altar. He’d crush them with his oversized molars, euphoria rushing over his face as specks of dust burst from the crushed morsel. He would not be satisfied till the pill was nothing more than a powdered memory of something restorative coating his tongue. I told him to stop, sent him article after article explaining why you shouldn’t chew pills. I searched them up so often, the algorithm started delivering the articles straight to my inbox. Yet he continued munching away.
When we both caught the flu (him from his recent trip to Japan, and I from tonguing him for two hours on Sunday night), I found myself on my knees. “Please, Doc,” I said at the clinic, desperate, “Tell us we shouldn’t chew these pills.” But the doctor looked at me and scoffed like I was stupid. Like a doctor’s condescension and a thousand results on google should have been enough. And still, as I dutifully swallowed my three pills the next morning, I heard the crunching of Jeremy enjoying a veritable feast.
Once, in bed, he crawled on top of me, hands reaching for the bra under my shirt. His lips planted atop mine, between murmurs of love and other platitudes. But the taste of his mouth was sharp and bitter, and I pulled away, retching.
“Oh, sorry, that was paracetamol.” He muttered, wiping his mouth with the back of his palm, working his tongue across his teeth to lick up the dregs.
I spat. “You have dust all over your lips. It’s gross.” I pried him off me and rinsed my mouth out with mouthwash. The next time he kissed me, his breath warm on my face, his lips tasted like cherry, sweet and inviting. I leaned in and breathed him in, trying to commit this moment to memory, where he was my boyfriend, not a pill munching maniac.
I only learnt later that I had tasted specks of a sugar-coated Ibuprofen. We broke up soon after, for reasons unrelated. In all honesty, I would have been happy to let him chew himself to death. Which he almost did two months later, when he overdosed on blood pressure medication by chewing instead of swallowing. His heart nearly gave out, and I realized our relationship never made his heart beat quite as fast as the thrill of chewing pills.
The memory of that brief relationship only wormed itself back into my head the day I brought home that little container of blue oblong pills, meant to shape my body into something else entirely. Holding the pill, I imagined my mouth reforming itself, becoming like his, always lightly dusted with a coat of some curative residue. And as I placed the sweet tang of boyhood on my tongue, I finally understood. I was suddenly overcome with the irresistible urge to chew like my life depended on it.
