Adam abouty-bout to go to work.
What a day. Suffice it to say that I felt like crap this morning and was able to pour it all into this:
Everything gets swimmy. Indistinct. Fuzzy. I stagger into the bathroom.
I ignore the crowd in the room and carve out some personal space in front of the mirror. I look at myself – really look at myself – for the first time in ages. I look like hell. I feel worse than I should. I am barely recognizable. The bags under my eyes have grown to nearly-epic proportions, making my eyes look sunken and hollow. My eyelids are heavy and thick. Gummy. They scrape against my eyes like sandpaper and I try not to close them but my eyes are so dry that I blink rapid fire, matching time with the tic that has started under my right eye. It is a pulsing spasm of the muscle that I can see in the mirror.
I look scared, unsure, and terrifying. I stand and watch my reflection blink stupidly as if confused by a question I haven’t even asked. I feel dumb. The fuzz in my head is turning my brain into a mere showpiece, no longer functional for more than paranoid suppositions and blind rage. Do these actually come from the brain or from somewhere else? It must be my heart, currently the most active of all my internal organs. My heart finds all this very amusing and is pumping twice as hard as it needs to in order to get my water-thin blood through my veins. I think about coffee and I swear I can actually hear my heart laughing at me, daring me to thin out my blood even more while adding some stimulants.
My hands are shaking so badly that when I plant them on the counter in an attempt to feel some small amount of steadiness, the shakes travel up my arms to my shoulders. My stomach feels like it is rotating over a fire that Is slowly boiling whatever is left inside. I stink like death. There is the taste of rot in my mouth – evil, like demons have crawled in there to die.
I ignore the stares of the kids in the bathroom with me, all of them not concerned, so much as looking for a freak show. They wonder what the old man in the ratty suit will do next. Is he going to lose his shit? I grip the sink tightly, the blue veins in my hands popping out in high relief against my pale skin.
The edges of my vision are blurry. Strobing. The flickering fluorescent lighting isn’t helping. Looking at myself is tiring as if everything I see is pulling at my eyes and dragging me down. Exhaustion overtakes me. I feel it everywhere in my body. It is both a weight and an emptiness; a physical presence that is both an absence and a burden.
I don’t think I’m going to make it through the night. Or through this life. My eyes are melting. My chest is burning. My mouth, my throat. If I still have a soul, it’s killing me too.
A voice behind me asks, “Dude?” In the mirror I see a kid, 18 or 19 years old. He is made-up in whiteface with black rings of mascara around his eyes. He looks like I feel. He looks like I look. His costume is a slight exaggeration of my reality.
“What do you want?” I manage, still gripping the sink, still holding on for dear life though I can’t see the point.
“Are you alright?”
“No.” I stop myself. I am not confiding in this kid. I am not bringing myself down to the point where I am admitting that I don’t feel so hot – much less the rest of the story – to some goth kid in a rock club in some college town. “I mean…. I’m fine.”
I give myself one last glance in the mirror. A twisted smile crosses my face. It is a frightening smile and I see the kid take a step back behind me. I give myself a wink, the smile and the facial tic turning it into a leering look. I turn from the mirror and leave the bathroom.
