"I'm Not Crazy"

VII.

I did not leave my apartment the day after I met Riley. I skipped classes and laid in bed and ignored the unending urge in me to throw up. I imagined myself to be a corpse, cold and stiff and without thought. I was death, embodied. The line between the alive and the dead had become transparent.

At first, I was just stuck with the same feeling everyone typically had in the morning, a reluctance to get up and face my day. Then I thought maybe I was having my first hangover. It felt a little bit like the minor withdrawal I'd experienced when doctors had been switching meds around while I was growing up. My body was in yearning. I told myself I just needed a few moments to recover from that. It had been a fitful sleep, with constant periods of consciousness against my best efforts. I was just tired, or drained.

Eventually it eclipsed past those moments. The sun rose high in the sky out my window and the room became warmer than comfortable. Still, I couldn't find it in myself to move.

I had a class that morning. I couldn't recall what the class was, but I knew that as I laid there I was certainly missing the beginnings of it. I was missing my walk to the campus. Then I was missing the hustle and bustle of the busy hallways on my way to class. Then I was missing the agonizing moment of contemplation I always had before I'd choose to sit in the same seat I'd normally choose. I was missing what was the consistent symphony of my built life.

It continued on like that. I laid in bed rotting like old fruit, and the day that I was missing continued to pile up around me. I still could not bring myself to move. I could not force myself to comply with the routine that had become my lifeline in the previous weeks. I was a broken toy. More accurately, I was a toy that worked perfectly fine until some parent found it annoying and took out the batteries. I lay there clattered on the floor with no charge or power to make me animate myself again. A child would see me in all of my glorious uselessness and it would weep.

I would be pathetic enough to bring tears to eyes.

My home echoed. Eventually I could hear my neighbors outside the window, and although I imagined them looking in at me like I was a snake behind the glass of an exhibit at the zoo, all I could see through the window was the empty street. A car would pass periodically. I imagined I was a speed bump. I imagined it running me over.

I had to get up after that thought. Lying in bed with a thought of such pointed harm was too dangerous. The thought could fester until it was a rot. The rot would spread across my entire brain, poisoning it cells and neurons. The entire organism was in danger. It would hurt itself in its confusion.

Then came the wandering. I found myself slowly padding my way through all the rooms in a nervous shuffle, my eyes slipping from one thing to the next as if something in the empty apartment would offer me respite. My intruder from the previous night had asked me why things were so empty. He'd held up the pill bottle in the living room and accused me of being a pill popper or something of the sort. Maybe I was a pill popper? Maybe it was evident in the way my bag jangled with pharmaceutical solutions for every minor problem; for my inability to manage life like a normal person. My empty apartment, empty because the state would only take care of the basics, would stay empty because the pills could only do so much to make me a functional human. They couldn't make me normal, certainly not employable, and certainly not self sufficient.

I barely even noticed when the hyperventilating started. The breath was practically ripped from my lungs and it was hardly even a thought to me because everything else was raving so fast. I was used to it, wasn't I? I was used to the entirety of my body losing control and failing me. I was used to my thoughts circling down a deep invisible drain. I was used to my heart being weak and fickle and dumb.

There was a knock on my door some time later, loud and pervasive to my unexpectant ears. By then, I was just sitting on the floor of the living room holding the pill bottle again. I was supposed to take one. That's what had been told to me when they were prescribed. In a time like this, one where I felt very clearly out of control, I was supposed to take the pill and lie down for a while. I was supposed to feel the soaring numbness, and I was supposed to think it was relief. My thoughts would quiet. A calm feeling would take over. My chest wouldn't hurt so bad.