My feelings are empty bottles. One can wonder who emptied them of their worth, but no one will question the contents were always meant to be consumed. Courage is a liquid. It evaporates. Affection is sand. You find mine sticks on you in strange places, I bet. You can tell from which bottles hold each but my feelings are empty bottles.

I can blow into them and make pretty sounds. I can smash one over your head in a rage like a bar fight scene in a movie, thought in real life it takes much more force to break something over your head or I am much weaker than I thought. In real life, the bottles are more likely to break on accident than through willful malice. The paper bag I use to move them to recycling rips under the weight, letting glass fall and shatter at our feet.

But that won’t actually happen because I have made a permanent collection of the bottles and they will never have to move. I collect them to reuse as containers for experiments in my pharmacy. You tell me I will be the one, uniquely and personally, to be held liable if my pharmacy is discovered by the authorities whose sole job is to make sure everybody’s bottles are new, clean, safe for consumption. Though others may be complicit in the pharmacology, they are my bottles.

I am hoping the authorities will mind the debris of my fantasies crushed in the ground, and know to step around. With enough imagination, it will take them a lifetime to navigate the broken bottles of my conjuring. But like I said, these bottles are going nowhere, and that’s why they will never, ever break.