Sweating. Vision blurry. My breath is shallow in my chest. My mind can’t get its claws in anything.
“Come on. Focus. You’re okay.”
A truck outside honks its horn and I scream, dropping my glass of water into the sink. Constantly jumping. Firing on all cylinders.
“Come on, kid. Breathe.”
Pacing back and forth in my apartment, digging my fingernails into the palms of my hands.
“You’re okay. You’ve been sick. Stuck inside. That’s all this is.”
Boil water. Make peppermint tea. Settle onto the couch and pull my legs up under me.
Sleeping twelve hours a day. Trying to get well physically and I can feel my mind tightening. A spindle already holding too much yarn and doesn’t know what to do with the excess.
Tomorrow. Tomorrow I’ll feel better. I’ll leave the house. Talk to someone. Stretch my legs. Get some sun. Stop understanding why caged animals gnaw off their own limbs.
On Friday I can barely get out of bed. On my walk back from my therapist’s office I sit down on a bench and debate calling a car. Exhausted. Drained.
Sick.
I spend Saturday just barely functioning. We go to a new building and sign on an apartment. My head is all watery, trying to put pieces together. Forcing itself to function.
Sunday. Monday. Couch-locked again. I hide under a pile of blankets and drink as much water as I can. My achy body whispering, “I told you to slow down.”
I catch myself flipping through ten different open tabs in my browser. Rechecking my email. Picking up my phone and sending text message after text message. Staring out the window, pacing around the office. I get up and do a circle. Grab a snack, refill my ridiculously gigantic water mug, talk to someone for a minute.
I’m firing on all cylinders. But not in the way that’s helpful. I’m not zoomed in, hyper-focused. I’m not tossing around the same problem and working it from all angles. I’m overwhelmed. I’m fumbling. There isn’t a starting point and I don’t even know what finishing would look like.
Hours go by and don’t think I’ve gotten anything done. Don’t feel like I can form a sentence to explain why that is or what it feels like. The crawling skin and pounding head that beg me to crawl under the desk, curl up, and cry.
There is nothing tragic happening here. Overall I’m pretty good. Nothing much to complain about. I sleep hard through the night. But my brain is trying to stretch itself out in every direction. Clawing at the inside of my skull, hoping to find a rough surface to latch itself to.
Traction.
Always looking for traction. I can make the lists. I know the things I want to do, but I have no sense of slow progression. I am a conveyor belt. Want to churn through everything as soon as it is set in front of me. No time for it to dry around the edges. There is urgency everywhere, for everything.
Just get it done. I don’t want to think about it anymore. I don’t know how to just let it sit. Let the pot simmer on the back burner and come back to it. There’s too much I want to spend my time on to offer any of it any room to marinate.
Move.
I like to think I could learn to give myself some leeway. Settle into the idea it’s okay for things to take time. To figure out how to be okay with things sitting. Undone. To let them be without letting them unravel me.
Ruby Pipes 