1. Pain

I compose in bed, in fits and starts, on my phone. Quick, get the thought down before it disappears. Quick, get it right before memory distorts your words. Now, now, hurry, quick.

Sometimes I write at 2am, when I can’t sleep, and the pain is wrapped around my legs like barbed wire. Sometimes I write in my sleep, spitting out the nonsense of my dreams, unintelligible to my conscious mind come morning. But poetic, in a way.

Sometimes bed is the bathroom floor, and I compose there too. Lying on my side, hot face pressed against cool tile, tears in my eyes and on my cheeks and spilling over and over and over. Drowning in them, like Alice. My phone, the looking glass.

2. Fatigue

I want to read but I’m too tired. I want to write but I’m too tired. I want to go for a walk, but I’m too tired. I’m so tired of being too tired.

It feels like spring tonight. The air is cool but not crisp. The sounds of the night carry. Occasionally, I get a whiff of jasmine on the breeze. It reminds me of something, but I’m not sure what. A place? A time? Or just a mood, perhaps, a feeling?

My body leaves an impression on the mattress. Or does the mattress impress upon me? The only evidence that I have existed.

3. Fear

The future is a black hole.

I am folding in on myself. My illness is the event horizon. Beyond it my future stretches infinitely, growing ever narrower.

It is Schrodinger’s cat. It exists and does not (it does not).

I am liminal space, purgatory, limbo. The sky is vast and full of wonders, and I am a speck, a supernova, burning bright in death and shrinking, folding in–

endlessly.

4. Anger

I’m not a fucking warrior.

If I am fighting, then I am losing every battle. If I am fighting, then I am wielding a rusted sword while my enemies brandish muskets. I am Sisyphus rolling my boulder up the hill, and every day watching it roll right back down, down, down.

This illness is not a war that can be won. This life is not a film with a brass band score, an uplifting swell of trumpets and the staccato beat of drums. It is a dumpster fire. Acrid smoke. It burns the lungs.

5. Melancholy

Sick again today. Ice pack as pillow, bathroom floor as bed. Do I look as hopeless as I feel? Alone, here, in the dark.

I spend my days trying to distract myself from my body, from my embodiment. My nervous system is hyperactive, overattentive, catastrophising.

I feel homesick. But the home I’m sick for doesn’t exist. I’m homesick for a body that works, a future that excites me, for my own goddamn space.

I miss my independence. Does my independence miss me too?

6. Ugliness

I cannot write beautifully about my illness. I cannot make my reality palatable for curious eyes. I cannot mask my anger with manners, my grief with pretty words.

Writing is a way to process, to feel through the pain. When I’m lying on the bathroom floor, the cool tile against my hot skin, I describe my body to myself. Words may not let me tame the unruliness inside of me, but they help me understand it.

I am having panic attacks for the first time in six years, or: an ex-friend has resurfaced, I have developed allergies, my medication is making me ill, my city goes back into lockdown. I don’t remember how to calm the storm that is my anxiety. The panic rolls over me in waves and I drown in it.

7. Time

I feel like I’m stuck in the past, living through memories instead of being here, now.

My ten year high school reunion is soon (past… forgotten…). I probably won’t go, because a decade is still not enough temporal distance. Will there ever be enough?

It’s already been two years (three… four…) since I was overseas, applying for graduate programs. It feels both longer and shorter than that. I had so much potential, then. Living in these memories is living in hope of a better future.

8. Fragility

I don’t really have anything more to say, I don’t know, I’m tired

I’m too fucking tired to think of anything better. But I’m here. I’m here, and I’m writing, and maybe that’s enough.

Maybe that’s enough.