Night of The Inferno

The Day Before

11 October, 2021.

The whole day went well. I mentioned that multiple times throughout my day, and now I feel I should have kept my lips sealed.

The side effects must have planned it all along, there isn't any explanation I have for it except for that. Well, there's also the self-invoked jinx I threw on myself the moment I blabbed about how wonderful my day was.

"Side effects? Which side effects? I am the side effect."

Yes, I am dissapointed but sober enough to admit that was me. It was I who uttered such vile words in a drunken stupor given to me by my own childish pride. I am thoroughly ashamed, and now the wiser, older version of me looks back in time at that moment while sadly shaking my head.

Someone should have smacked my head and told me "Think, man, think! You haven't even waited a day for your body to respond to the vaccine!"

Well, maybe not a really hard smack to the head, because I had a headache coming up.

It was a baby migraine I should have paid more attention to. It began around midday, less than two hours after I took the shot to the shoulder. It was a sign. A warning.

Instead of responding to my body's call of distress, I thought to myself "Oh, just lots and lots of water. That's all I need, they said."

I believe it's worth mentioning that the two people I went to get vaccinated with made the brilliant decision of willingly letting sleep knock them out for hours.

Me? Oh, no. I was much too tough for a measly drop of liquid squeezed into my iron shoulder. I was invincible!

Extra emphasis on the "was" part.

The whole day went suspiciously smoothly. It got even better when I received a call from my guardian angel, who promptly warned me to stop thinking about death and to stop lying in bed while blankly staring at the roof. Seriously, that's an unnaturally common way people die.

Well, I spent the rest of my day lying in bed, dutifully not looking at the roof like it was a mirror in a horror movie (you know that ugly, loathsome mirror and what happens to those who look in it. We all do).

I think it's worth noting that by nighttime, I was feeling okay. My body decided to become my teacher of English by giving me a simple cloze to work out before it went into a state of emergency:

The sea is quiet before a ___.

Sadly, I was way too absorbed in reading The Trials of Apollo and playing Castlevania to realize what the answer was.

It was "storm".

My body went mute on me to prepare itself for the storm that was going to begin shortly after, the impending war I was deliberately ignoring.

It was the storm that would go on to make me think "Wow, this is so irritatingly painful I should document it!"

The storm started in my fingers.