Kate Maxlow
I Figured Out How to Turn Dopamine Into Solid Gold
Last Saturday, after the second espresso martini, I figured out how to turn dopamine into solid gold. Then, because the espresso martinis were hungry, I ground the dopamine gold into little flakes and used them to flavor some spaghetti. It tasted like chicken. I wrote down the recipe and put it somewhere I’d be sure to find it again, and accordingly, I haven’t seen it since.
So on Monday, I ask my therapist if she can hypnotize me into remembering. She rolls her eyes and tells me to picture the last place I had it, or maybe try journaling about it. I shrug and say that seems like a lot of work and maybe I’ll just use the Betty Crocker recipe for chicken piccata instead. (I can feel her silent groan every time I waltz into her office; she has given me all the handouts on mindfulness and I have yet to read even one. But really, how am I supposed to take life advice from someone who secretly believes you can’t actually turn dopamine into gold?)
The following Tuesday, I find the recipe beside the boxers that went to live under my bed, the silk ones with mushrooms that proclaim, ‘Hey, I’m a fungi!’ They belonged to my ex, who said I needed to buckle down and take life seriously for once and that’s why he couldn’t be with me anymore. He sells tires now and is married to a professional astrologist. Once a month I sign up for a new email at a public library and spam her business page with questions about Ophiuchus, the ignored stepchild of the astrology world.
In November, she shuts down her site. Feeling guilty, I make an appointment to have her do my star chart and I promise myself I won’t tell her I could just use ChatGPT or (wait for it) Gemini. Her office, tucked above a company that installs bespoke fallout shelters, smells like a cloying miasma of amber and sandalwood, and I sneeze three times in the waiting room. Her previous appointment is running over—I hear a woman crying about something that her dead Corgi said at the last seance—so I chicken out and leave. I stop by TJ Maxx and buy my ex-boyfriend’s professional astrologist wife thirteen different scented candles, one to represent each Zodiac sign (I see you Ophiuchus), and leave them on her doorstep with an unsigned card that says ‘Hang in there!’
When I tell this story to my therapist, she recommends I see the doctor to change my medication. That’s when I tell her: I haven’t taken that junk in months because it makes the dopamine taste like blue cheese and goat urine. She does not ask how I know the taste of goat urine, which is unfortunate, because it’s a really funny story.
Instead, she gesticulates wildly in my direction and shouts, “Why are you like this?”
Ah, finally! I think to myself. For years I have been digging away at her professional training and demeanor with a spoon, wondering what’s behind the careful facade, wanting to connect with her soul the way she interrogates mine. She has that special gift: a big heart hidden behind a face she keeps carefully neutral as her patients confess all the horrors of the universe.
Her heart is so beautiful I want to bite it to know what a good person actually tastes like. Just the one bite, I think—before the world goes up in flames, before we are all ash and memories, like best friends who never stayed in touch. Like those three big countries who finally decided they’d had enough of posturing and meddling and hypocrisy. For months, they sent our country threats and I bullied a professional astrologist because her stars were slowly killing us all. I bit my nails, hand-copied star maps by moonlight, and prayed to all the gods who’d forgotten to remember their Mindfulness lessons. Then finally, last week—my birthday!—those three once-best friends sent us bombs and mushroom clouds. I can’t wait to see what we send them back, any day or minute now.
So I tell her, “We’re standing at the end of the world. Why shouldn’t we enjoy this last, heady draught of dopamine to its fullest?”
She puts her head in her hands and cries.
I pat her shoulder and ask if she’d like to borrow my gratitude journal.
Kate Maxlow is a recovering school district administrator who likes to wear sparkly shoes when she has tea with her existential dread. She lives in Virginia with her family. Her work appears in Maudlin House, Defenestration, Jersey Devil Press, and more. She can be found at https://katemaxlowauthor.com/kate-maxlow or on BlueSky at @katemaxlow.bsky.social.
