stop. start. stutter.

Zenathax. It was an antidepressant. One little blue-and-white pill, three times a day. Worked like a charm, and only had half the unpleasant side effects of any of the other antidepressants on the market. The FDA rushed it to market faster than Viagra. Doctors estimated it let thousands of people lead full, happy, productive lives in the first year alone.

They didn't start realizing its side effects until later.

Oh, it didn't happen until you built up enough of a level of it in your blood, in your brain chemistry. And it started slowly. A look, a glance, no I couldn't possibly be -- By the time they realized, it was already too late. Over two hundred thousand Americans, people who'd been on the drug since day one, had, quietly and mostly without fanfare, flipped sexual orientation.

Nobody knows how it happened. The doctors are still fucking baffled. In the middle of all the media fuss, a panel at Johns Hopkins filed a study proving once and for all that "who you wanna fuck" was a function of the brain. Apparently Zenethax did something to that bunch of synapses, flipped them "on" where they were "off" or something like that. I'm not a doctor. I don't know how it works.

I do know that the results were -- heh -- electric. The right-wing groups started screaming, of course. The drug was pulled off the market. The class-action lawsuit's still pending. At first they hoped that stopping the drug would work, would make you go back to the way you used to be. Then, they tried stopping the drug, letting it flush out of the patient's system, and starting it up again. They were both good plans. Didn't work, of course. But good plans.

Five years later, fourteen percent of that original two hundred thousand -- mostly the breeders who were married, with kids, or the queers who were in long-term partnerships, or the ones with some serious issues they needed to work out -- have offed themselves. They just couldn't handle rebuilding their entire personal identity, I guess. I mean, if it had to happen to any group of people, the severely and chronically depressed are probably the worst to have it happen to. They're not exactly in good shape to have to rebuild from ground up.

Me? I'm not depressed at all. I used to be. Have been, my whole life. Then I finally found someone I want to share that life with. It's not my fault we were both born liking the wrong set of plumbing for each other, was it?

One little blue-and-white pill. They pulled it off the market, but you can still find it if you know where to look. Come on. Let's find a glass of water and start to keep each other sane.