I bolt up in my bed, sweat dripping from every miniscule pore in my skin. It surrounds me, plastering my clothing and sheets to my limbs. A nasty pool of perspiration puddles around me, darkening my blanket. But even as I drown in the heat of my room, shivers rake through my body. They race like horses through my bones and turn around when they reach my toes, to touch my head again.
A pounding reverberates through my skull, like someone placing miniscule nails onto my scalp and then hitting them in with a hammer; out and in, out and in. The smallest sounds make me cringe, even just the wind outside or the rustle of my sheets across my legs. I try to swallow the nasty metallic taste in my throat, but it rises back up, fighting against me. And on the third or fourth time of trying to rid my mouth of the taste, more than just my saliva rushes back up.
I try my hardest to rush from my bed to my bathroom, but my socks impair me enough so that I slip and fall to my knees. A small, pitiful groan escapes my lips and echoes around my room just like the smashing in my head. I try to push myself to a standing position, but only get halfway there before a rush of blood pulls me back down.
Decidedly, I start a piteous crawl to my bathroom door. And on a different type of halfway through a journey, I cannot force myself to go further. My back arches up and nasty bile drips from my mouth onto the floor. Tears start prick at the corners of my eyes. I let out a frustrated yell as another bout of my stomach splashes onto the floor, this time filled with more substance.
Fuck, this is the worst part of being sick.
It’s not the quiet noises that seem too loud or how I can never seem to get comfortable. It’s not the nasty taste in my mouth—albeit, this comes a close second. It’s that I throw up practically incessantly until my stomach is completely devoid of anything at all. I retch again, hating the feeling. And the disgustingly horrific taste of steak fries takes up the metallic one.
I heave a few more coughs before my body settles into a restless stillness. As much as I know that I need to clean up the mess I’ve made, my right mind tells me I just need to lie back down. And so I do.
I flop down onto my side, my right temple pressed against the floor. My forehead slowly chills to the temperature of the wood, and I sigh. This feels nice. But it only holds me comfortably sated for a moment before the rank smell of my throw up reaches my nose. And I cannot lay here while it just sits there, smelling.
So I again attempt to pull myself up right and walk to my bathroom. This time, though, I actually make to the door all well and good, save for a few stumbles that I quickly recovered from. I slip into the dark room, half tempted to keep the light off, but I need to see. Sighing, I flick the switch and am enveloped in a startlingly bright light. I blink for a moment, adjusting as well as possible to the glare.
Finally able to see without much strife, I turn in a slow circle to face my toilet. An unused roll of TP sits on the back basin, practically saying “Here, use me clean up your nastiness”. So I snatch it up and stumble on through to the puddle of—of it. I’m not even sure it constitutes being vomit.
I bend down and start to unravel the two-ply around my hand. When I’ve got probably half of the roll surrounding my fingers, I rip it off and begin to mop up my mess. It’s times like these when I childishly miss my mom, or the girls. I mean, I miss them in other times too, but right now it comes to me like a tsunami wave, crashing around my chest and up my throat and coming out in strangled sobs. I just need someone to do this for me so I can sleep. And so it’s a selfish kind of nostalgia.
Once I’ve got as much as I can up, I toss it into my waste bin next to my right-hand nightstand, and then unravel only a little more to wipe up the remainder. With the evidence gone, I go back to my bathroom and retrieve two sprays—a germ killer and a Febreze. I let the germ killer sit while I spray the air freshener around my room in short arcs. A vanilla-lavender smell fills up my nose as I inhale deeply.
