Nora Kinkaid Wants Her Life Back

Sick in the Head

Why did I need to learn this lesson? Christine tells me to listen to my heart. It wants comfort. It wants to be held. But I am so mad at you. For ruining him. I really don't care I had to go through it. But to take him down? That's just cruel. What did he ever do to me except treat me with kindness and love? It wasn't enough but it was better than this tortuous cycle you have me in. I'm really upset. The joke's on me though because I have nothing to show. Just a conversation in a journal with a non-visible spirit I put my faith into.

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After Joe's birthday Oliver had to travel for work. He would be gone for at least three weeks. He would only be home one day in between and even then I told him it was okay. I would be fine without him. It almost felt like a relief. Like, it's fine you don't have to see your girlfriend for twenty-one days because she's super self-sufficient. Plus I knew that if I had been traveling and was only home one day, I would want me own shower, my own bed and moment to myself. Who knows what Oliver wanted. I never asked. I simply assured him that yes I would be fine. I gave him a kiss goodbye at my apartment door and crawled back into bed. I was pleased with myself. Twenty-one days was nothing. Time would fly.

Oliver had only been gone for four days when I went to work one day and everything stopped working. I hadn't been feeling well. But not in the typical illness sense. Nothing hurt per se. No fever, no chills, no sore throat. I only noticed that glassware sounded really loud when I put it down on the counter. The sound of the glass hitting the tile made my ears reverberate. I must have put it down too hard. I began needing to raise and lower the volume of a TV show multiple times throughout an episode. There must have been something wrong with my TV. Why else would the volume raise and lower so distinctly? I would feel completely fine and then be hit by a wave of exhaustion so great that I couldn't move from a chair for at least thirty minutes. I wasn't sleeping well since the Seaport. It must have been catching up to me.

Oh, I had also begun losing vision in my left eye. I forgot to mention this earlier to you. My left eye is unique. Sometimes it stops working. During this time, it would stop working for seconds then minutes at a time. I don't mean like oh there's something in it. I mean it would straight up quit. My left eye just gave up on seeing things for blocks of time when it felt like it. I didn't know who to tell. I told my mom, she said it was stress. I called my brother, he told me he once had his eye twitch for a month. No big deal.

All of this was going on when I went to work one day. I was sitting in my boss's office when I started to feel faint. My body got really hot, I got tunnel vision and my hands started sweating. I suddenly felt difficulty concentrating and remember feeling like I was talking underwater. My boss had the common sense to call health services. By the time I got there I felt fine. It wasn't until they turned off the lights and asked me to lay down that I felt the crushing sense of exhaustion hit me like a wave.

They sent me home and told me to rest. They said it's probably a migraine. Had I had one before? No. Never in my life. Did I have a headache? Nope not at all. Did I feel nauseous? Not in the slightest. Hmm they said, it's best to just ride it out. Dark room, no light, no distractions. If you feel worse, go to the hospital. I took the T home. The vibration of the train made me nauseous. The lights seemed brighter than normal and the outside world felt distant. Everything felt a little too real. When I got home I did as the doctor ordered. I climbed into bed and closed my eyes and slept.

The day after I laid flat on my back on the couch in my apartment. Not by choice, I couldn't get up. I wasn't paralyzed. I was so exhausted that the thought of rolling my body over to one side caused me physical pain. My skin felt like tin foil. My legs were cramped up and my muscles wouldn't release. If I moved just the slightest inch, it would send a ricochet of pain through my body. This wasn't normal but the doctors told me to rest. So I tried. I really did. But at 11 pm that night I couldn't take it anymore.

My birthday was the next day, Halloween. Kind of a big day both because it was my birthday and because duh it's Halloween. I refused to let the pain break me. I searched for any wellness experience I could find. Massage, reiki, acupuncture but all of them were booked up. All of them except for a full-body treatment with a woman named Cheryl.

Cheryl was a hoot. I can't tell you the relief I felt when she replied at eight am the day of my birthday saying she would open her store for me. When I arrived she noted how unlikely it was for her to check her emails on the weekend but it must be fortuitous that we met. I barely heard what she was saying. I was focusing on breathing. The walk to Cheryl's had taken all the energy right out of me. I had woken up feeling better and let the birthday energy carry me through Bay Village into the South End. But by the time I got to Cheryl's the familiar feeling of weakness and faintness was back. Cheryl hustled me into a bathroom with a large tub filled with water. She pointed out what to oils to put in when, how to clean off and empty the drain. She even gave me an emergency button.

"I don't normally do this but you don't look so good" She handed me the button.

"Press it if you need me and I'll come running. I'm just afraid I won't hear you in the other room if you holler." I nodded and promised I would use it if it came to that. I assured her it would be unlikely I would put it to use. I didn't have the heart to tell her I had almost passed out in the shower the day before. Something was wrong but it wasn't Cheryl's problem. It was my own.

After my salt bath, Cheryl wrapped me up in a blanket and ushered me into a hot room and onto a massage table. She laid me down like a newborn baby and began fussing over my care. It was the first time I got a solid look at her. She couldn't have been more than fifty. She had soft skin that looked well-cared for and bright brown eyes. Her hair was a brassy blonde, from years of box-dye she told me. She was covered in stuff. I mean every inch of her was covered in jewelry or layers of clothing. She was like a walking want-to-be-guru and I loved it. Besides, she had just made sure I hadn't drowned in her bathtub so I owed her something.

I let Cheryl wrap me up in seaweed and saran wrap while I drifted in and out of sleep. She would talk to me and I'd murmur a response every once and a while. I remember she was excited to go home because her daughter was throwing a Halloween party and Cheryl was meeting her new boyfriend.

"It's funny what fear does to you. It can rob you of the most exciting things." Cheryl whispered into my ear as she rubbed calendula oil into my scalp. I nodded. She wasn't wrong. The table I laid on was positioned under a crystal orb. I don't know if you've ever seen a crystal orb but let me tell you, it's certainly a sight. Crystals are filled with energy but energy requires a conduit. So a crystal orb has to be hung together with copper because obviously copper works as a great conduit. Maybe not obviously. I didn't know that before I laid on the table. Cheryl told me. She also informed me that there was another crystal orb hanging underneath the table beneath my body. What an interesting thing to be told. I was being suspended between two orbs of crystals that should in theory take away the forces that were plaguing me.

Cheryl seemed confident. This goes down as one of the weirder experiences of my life. I know that sounds crazy considering everything I've said this far. But truly, you try being knocked on your ass by sharp pains all over with no known cause, then get thrown in a bath, wrapped up in seaweed and covered in oil all while talking to a complete stranger. Not exactly your average Saturday. Cheryl assured me, if I was feeling exhausted, this would put me right back together. She was right, I left that spa and felt amazing. I went to sleep that night and woke up feeling like a million bucks.

As I write this now I remember, Oliver didn't wish me a happy birthday. It's been eighteen months and I've had a whole new birthday since then and only now I remember that he never wished me a happy birthday on the actual day. It makes me sad. Both because he didn't reach out and because I didn't think about it until now. Who doesn't realize their boyfriend hasn't wished them happy birthday? Someone who's preoccupied I suppose. But it still makes me sad.