I Hope You Don’t Know What I’m Talking About

by A Lil' Irish Lass

May 13, 2008

It doesn’t creep up like many things tend to do. But down. Down from the top of my head and then on throughout the rest of my body it goes. I feel it in my eyes first. No. That’s wrong. In my throat. It starts as a little bud in the bottom of my throat. A bud whose pernicious flower blooms far too rapidly. Whose vines spread throughout my every inch, strangling me from the inside out.

This bud in the bottom of my throat is a hot ache that I can’t quite swallow around. I feel it blossoming up into my nose. It’s the same sensation that comes with an unaccomplished sneeze. My brain, addled as it is, recognizes these signs and it only makes things worse.

The vines have started their spread. My breaths come in gasps. Awkward and lacking in rhythm. My belly button pulls in towards my spine, making my already thin frame thinner still. The stomach spasms start and the searing pains shoot through my abdomen, boiling and icy all at once. I feel nauseous in an empty, starved kind of way. My core feels as though it were vibrating. Not like an incoming call or a washer cycle. It’s more subtle. Almost a humming. Which is ironic, really, when I think about the force that’s raging through me.

But I don’t, not at the time, because I can’t. Or I can, but it’s too much. In fact, all I’m doing is thinking. So much so that it seems to have overloaded my mind. The thinking overflows the chambers it’s supposed to occupy, neatly arranged in my brain. It overflows and the excess rushes out into the rest of my body. Into places that it’s not supposed to be. And the rush of the overflow pulls me under and I’m drowning. Every gasping breath draws in more of the flood and I slip under the current, deeper and deeper.

It spills out of my eyes in great big torrents. The hot tears come pouring out of the corners of my eyes. Then the flood rushes too fast, and the tears weigh down my lashes; hanging heavy like the boughs of a tree overladen with ripe fruit. It tastes like salty tea, puddling there on my lips. There could be gallons more eager to rush out, so great is the pressure behind my eyes. The eye ache becomes a headache and this makes everything worse. Do you remember that commercial from the 80s? It was one of those this-is-your-brain-on-drugs commercials. The one with the fried egg. And that sound. The sound of the egg on the frying pan, sizzling and popping. That sound is how I feel.

And then everything gets really, really cold. Cold like pins and needles. Cold like goosebumps and shivering. (But my feet still sweat). And the cold seems to move to my eyes, because the tears stop and here comes the white, pinprickly lights. The snow on the high channels of the TV. All white and black and pixelated. And it moves so fast that it almost seems silver. Like little shards of metal. Shrapnel.

It stops.

My mind is the engine that won’t turn over. It screeches and squeals in a few failed attempts to start, but it rapidly resigns itself to its situation. It’s over. No more thinking. No more anything. I sit, limp, my body as inert as the mind that controls it. I’m fatigued in the deepest sense of the word; in a way I didn’t know existed. My lips are parted. My eyes are vacant and glassy. There are no more tears.

Someone, my mother or father or sister or friend, tells me what to do and I do it. I can’t process anymore, I can’t reason or decide. So I follow, I listen, I acquiesce. It feels so good to have another voice in there, speaking in declarative sentences to replace my muddled interrogatives and nonsensical exclamatories. The guilt, the shame, the disappointment in myself will come later. The frustration over being unable to control this, get past this, after all these years. It will come.

But, for now, I’m relieved to pass the burden onto someone else. To let them do the thinking for me. Whatever it takes to make this stop.

For now.

–
A Lil’ Irish Lass
writes here.

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