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v u l v a l i c i o u s

Diagnosis Inconclusive
2018-02-02 // 4:31 a.m.

It wasn't long before I realized that I was sick. That makes it sound like there's something that's obviously wrong. Sick is funny like that. A cough, sneezes, even pain shows sometimes.

This is different. People can see it, I guess. I talk slower, move slower. Sometimes walking is hard, and I list to the side like I need the wall to hold me up. Get the question, "are you going to pass out?"

No. Maybe. I don't know.

I'm sick. We don't know what's wrong. Have tried the big things. Everything obvious. I keep waiting for something to click, for a blood test to come back off the charts so that I can have something to understand. A diagnosis. A word. An internet search term and the chance of finding community.

A friend with fibro has called me disabled. I guess I am? I don't have the energy to do much more than take a walk or gently stretch. Maybe dance in the kitchen for a few minutes. I got winded taking the Christmas tree down the other night. I barely had the energy left to make food.

I'm not working. Right now I'm on medical leave, but soon enough it will have to end. At least for a bit. I have to try going back to work. I miss it. I miss my job, my co-workers, the customers. I miss talking about the thing I love with strangers and hefting wheels up onto the counter and touching the blade of a warm knife before I slide it into a half wheel of Comte.

I'm so scared that I won't be able to do it again. Really I'm sure of it. Which is bad. I don't have any reason to be sure of anything. There might be something that fixes me, still.

In the meantime, I casually wish I'd die in my sleep, wondering if saying it to myself or writing it in the quieter corners of the internet will make it happen. My family would get a death benefit. Someone would take my dog. I'm sure people would be sad, but I would just be a million pieces of consciousness floating out into the world and fitting myself into other living things.

Me, inside the branch of a redwood. Me, in the eye of a dog. Me, in the elbow of a little kid in Idaho. Me, in all the people I love. And when they die, I'm stuck together with all their consciousness, and we float somewhere else.

Not a bad existence. Probably better than this one. Unfortunately I'm not going to die in my sleep (probably) and I'm definitely not going to actively end my own life (ever, it's just not something I could do), so here I am. Staring at the void for too long and pretending to be ok.

I'm not ok. Not even a little. Every day I am scared and every day I cry. I used to rewatch Harold and Maude a couple of times a year, and the lines would stick in my head. Harold's mother walks in to find Harold acting out his suicide and says "I can't take much more of this," and the thing is you can hear in her voice that she doesn't mean the suicide so much as the acting. Anyway her voice and that line play in my head a lot.

I do a lot of pretending to be ok.

It's not as though I don't have anyone around to talk to. I have several friends who care about me a lot and who really do want to know how I'm doing, and my doctor--god bless her--really believes I'm sick, so it's not a fight when I go to her office.

But fuck I'm still lonely. And scared. And broke. And sad.

And sick.

back-forth

Logs on the fire fill me with desire - 2018-12-23
snowball effect - 2018-10-19
lesbian erotica 102 - 2018-09-29
possible futures and the unregretable past - 2018-07-30
death season - 2018-04-12