I woke up today with a massive headache, since the moment I opened my eyes my heart started pounding and three minutes later the pain had moved down to the front and back of my neck; I struggled to sit up and started rubbing at the back of my neck with my hand.
“Joana, long time no see.”
Cris’ brother’s voice kept echoing in my head and my mood, which was already terrible, kept getting worse. I stretched to reach the nightstand by my bed to reach my pills and take two of them. There are three different bottles, no labels, just colors: red for massive headaches, orange for regular ones, and blue that I need to take every morning no matter what; I took a blue one and two red ones. Then, I grabbed my phone and saw several messages from Cris but didn’t open them, I don’t know, it’s not that I was upset with her or anything, I just didn’t want to read what she wrote.
I remained sat in my bed, rubbing at the back of my neck and waiting for the pills to kick in, my lights were still off and the curtains were shut, so there wasn’t really any light coming in to the bedroom, and honestly all I wanted was to lay back down in bed and stay there all day, but on Saturdays I have therapy. So, with a really heavy feeling, I got out of bed and opened one of the curtains, the one that was the furthest from my bed.
I was feeling uneasy, unsteady, restless, I looked down into the street, I saw several people looking upwards and I couldn’t stop thinking they were just looking at me, or… I didn’t even know, it just didn’t make sense. I tried very hard to convince myself that that didn’t make sense, but there was something in the back of my brain insisting that they were, so I closed the curtain again.
I took my phone again and there were Cris’ messages just waiting to be read, my hand started shaking, I threw my phone into the bed and I bounced back and crashed against the wall, making a loud sound. My luck couldn’t get any worse.
“Joana, are you awake?”
My mother, what a drag, all I wanted was to just stay there in my room without anyone bothering me and, casually, it’s the first thing she decides to do, it really seemed impossible to have a moment of quiet in this house. I opened the door abruptly and I just stared at her.
“What do you want?”
She just looked at me and that filled me up with anger. Didn’t people ever get tired of looking answers in me? Its just so tiring. The truth is that the only here who doesn’t know anything is me.
“Just checking if you were awake.”
“Well, you’ve already seen that I am. What else?”
My leg started bouncing and I clutched the door harder than usual, I was feeling really angry, on the edge of losing control. Dammit. How hard was it to just leave me alone? I took in a deep breath, tightened my jaw and clutched the door even tighter; my mother noticed all this and waited a few seconds before speaking again.
