It’s been a while since I’ve been truly sick. Not the every day, I’m a little tired or sore, but sick. The sick of a blast furnace shooting out of your head while your body shivers in cold. The twitching, moaning, drooling can’t sleep sickness. The cycle of throwing up every twenty minutes, even though there is nothing left to throw up sickness.
That was last night. Today is the still sick but more of a limp rag doll of exhaustion sickness hangover. I’m not well enough to move fast, eat much or feel that I could ever get over this, but I’m out of the phase where I’m sure I will die.
Last night I was sure I would die, despite Andy’s protests and assurances that I most certainly would not. Andy, my saviour brought me aspirins, something, in my blinding all consuming pain, I hadn’t thought of. Within twenty minutes of taking them, I dropped into fitful stretches of sleep.
I took four showers last night. I stayed under the water until the water ran cold and the dial was turned to the hottest it could go. Sometimes I would stay standing, but as the night wore on, I preferred to sit in an upright fetal position, hugging my knees as the tub filled up, so I could make myself small enough to be in the center of the water falling from the shower head. Afterwards, I wrapped myself in a blue fuzzy towel sat on the side of bed and in decrepitude, eased myself back so I was laying down with my feet still touching the floor. My head felt twenty pounds to heavy for my weak, stick like neck. I stared at the ceiling while my Ipod chose random songs from it’s memory.
One of the songs was from The Sundays. A band I listened to in college. It reminded me of an outfit I used to wear. It was a white baby doll dress with a black flower pattern. It had a slip and a sheer outer covering. It was short, so I wore it with black nylon shorts. The dress belonged to my roommate, but she never wore it. I adopted it, and felt that it had become mine by default. When she cut it in half to make it a shirt, I was incensed. I always wore it with a pair of black scuffed up cowboy boots that I bought at a resale shop in Greenwich Village. The outfit was “early nineties” (because it was the early nineties), and probably if I looked at it now, it would be embarrassing. If I remember correctly, I even had a mirrored pair of round “John Lennon” sunglasses and crimped hair.
My roommate’s name was Kim. I remember sitting at a Denny’s with her a few days after she first dropped acid. She was trying to explain it to me since I had never done it. She was frustrated, because she couldn’t find the right words. She sighed and said, “Okay, okay, it’s like this”. She was eating a salad and picked up two of her croutons. “It’s like these two croutons, when your on acid, it’s so amazing. It’s like they can talk to each other and communicate, and It’s so beautiful”.
I smiled as I felt the floating, detached waves of sickness and discomfort in my fever dream state as I thought about Kim and her sensitive, meaningful croutons.
