Here is what is wrong with me.

At least, this is all what is wrong with me currently.

I don’t sleep. For about 95% of the day. The other 5% involves half hour naps. So here is how last night went: at 3, I get off the phone [damn my friends in California for being so intensely interesting and living in such an inconvenient time zone]. I read some more of In the Woods, which I’m not recommending to anyone yet because I have some fundamental issues with the author’s narrative style and the issues of believability that stem from it but I am unwilling to give up on because I just spent the last of this week’s spending money on two books and goddammit I will read them both from beginning to end. I will enjoy the process. I will make my non-work and non-work-out hours all about these books until I bleed the principles they espouse. Which, so far, for this book, seems to be that the rape and murder of children [not necessarily in that order] will bring any decent human being to their knees. Maybe this is just where I grew up, but I pretty much knew this already–have been a believer since day 1.

[deep inhalation, smiles, perky again]

Anyway, so I read a couple pages though I’m creeped out and a bit bored and judgmental re: the book until I feel a wee bit sleepy. I turn out the light, put the book down, cozy into the bed, and fall asleep. Half an hour later, I wake up. I am staring at my bookshelf, nee bedside table, and I’ve noticed I’m sweating and gripping the sheets tangled around my legs.

[As a digression: I used to be all uppity about not needing high-thread count sheets. I would sniff at the mere suggestion that a person need spend hundreds of dollars on 200 additional thread counts. I wouldn't make a point of purchasing of the lowest thread count available but I would go mid-level, something that I felt was discreetly pleasing against the skin. But I take it all back. Oh, ho. These sheets I just purchased-- at a pretty upscale store, mind you-- provide an undesirable exfoliation treatment in my sleep, or what would amount to sleep if I were still a sane person.]

I had a nightmare, which is a clean lead-in to my other problem. I keep dreaming that people leave me, specifically my mother. I had some other dream where my dad left, or EY left, or KW suddenly stopped answering and/or returning my calls. But mostly, these nightmares involve my mother, disappearing but saying bye, making a point of her departure. I don’t need to be told why I have these dreams. I just need the dreams to stop.

I blink at the outlines of books. My eyelids aren’t even remotely heavy. I sit up and read more. Until about 7, at which point I eke out an additional hour’s worth of sleep before I get ready for work. Before I even hit the bus stop, I have coffee in my hands. I sip without interruption. It is the one thing holding me up right now, this cup full of panacea in my very own hands. I feel giddy.

Which lasts about three minutes.

At work, I don’t speak to my coworkers. I am that focused on getting that coffee as quickly as possible in my veins, jump starting my brain.

I worry about the things that were discussed on the phone last night. About friends’ parents’ cancer treatments, about more death, about whether I should 150% be there for someone or whether I’m being there too much and have become a stand-in mother, about where to draw the lines. And then I think about the other conversations–about laughter and forgetting, about dodging subjects that are personally difficult for me, about being able to paint a picture of myself as fine, balanced even.

I spend my morning at work reading about pediatric Hodgkin’s disease and its link to the development of breast cancer later on in life. Rainbows are splitting over the sky above me and unicorns are prancing around I’m sure of it.

At lunch, I look through takeout menus with negative amounts of interest. I settle on a sandwich. I go and pick it up just to be outside where I’m wrong– no unicorns or rainbows here, not even a frigging puppy. When I’m back in the office, surrounded by PudMed articles [joy!] , and diagrams of a child’s chest and arrows pointing at tumors and likely diagnoses given their location [convenient!], I try to eat but can’t. The moment the sandwich comes veering towards my mouth, I feel ill. My salivary glands pump productively and I have that sickly sour taste in my mouth immediately before heaving the contents of my stomach after a hyper-alcoholic night out. I shelve the sandwich in the office fridge.

This is how it’s been going meal-wise for days. I eat a slice of toast one day. I have a couple chopstick’s pinches of rice another day. I poke at sukiyaki and eat some shredded cabbage, a slice of tofu tonight. And then I feel ill for hours. I am nauseous and cramping and wanting to stick my finger down my throat though I know it would be in vain. I subsist entirely on one iced coffee a day and a few glasses of water and then whatever food I’ve managed to sneak past my gag reflex. Everything else seems sour and rotten, makes me cold-sweat from the thought of putting it in my body, having to masticate through it to get it down there in the first place.

This all makes the gym seem like a joke. I max out on two miles on the treadmill now. I am stomping through the last quarter mile of it too. I slam my hand down weakly on the STOP button. I stretch some more. I convince myself to do another half hour on the elliptical. I go through a lifting routine. I am sure that enough hours of this over the course of a week will jog my appetite. But it doesn’t. Not that night. Not the next day. Or the next one after that.

Also, my propensity towards anger has become heightened and the results have intensified. Small things set me off. I find myself saying, screaming really, things that I used to have the decency to maintain as an inner monologue. In front of children and the elderly. My patience with patients [oncology patients, for crying out loud] is completely worn out. I snap. And then I apologize. And then I completely snap in half.

Even babysitting my favorite neighborhood child didn’t put me in brighter spirits. After he fell asleep on me, I immediately rolled him onto his back on the other side of the bed and continued reading my book. Occasionally, I would look over and see his bright cherubic face, and not even crack a smile.

It’ll kick in. My life. It has to.

That useless doctor asked me if I didn’t want any anti-depressants. And I said, very judgmentally, that I doubt that a few weeks of being upset warrants putting me in a catatonic state. I recall being very happy in Dolores Park with my friends a bit over a week ago. I remember being giddy from seeing them, about knowing I’d be home soon for good, about being home at that point in time with people who I needed to see and say goodbye to, about seeing my sister soon, and about hugging my mom and dad.

I can make myself better. Maybe not great. But at least hoist myself to a place brighter than here. I just need some time.