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Turns out that thing that clicked is called your epiglottis, and its job is to block your airways when you’re swallowing so that you don’t pull a Quarter Pounder into your lungs. But your epiglottis can also be triggered while you’re sleeping, like when you chase beer with your mom’s Ambien and drool so much that your body thinks you’re drowning and battens down the hatches. The only way to force your epiglottis to open back up is—ironically—to keep breathing, so that it feels the presence of air and knows that it’s safe to unclench. I ended up buying a personal fan online at three in the morning that I’ll keep in my nightstand drawer with fully charged batteries for the rest of my life, just in case I need to make my epiglottis stop malfunctioning.
It’s listed under my recent purchases now, along with the emergency hammers for breaking car windows in case you drive into a body of water, and a couple of fire ladders that I plan to put in strategic places upstairs once they arrive. But the shipping has been delayed, and you can bet my brain ran with that, imagining the tragedy of UPS pulling up only to find a pile of smoldering ashes. That’s Shakespeare levels of tragedy right there, and of course I am completely confident it’s going to happen. I know that it’s unlikely, but not impossible.
It’s the last two words that drive my decision-making.
There’s a lot of cross-posting between rb/anxiousinohio and rb/depressedinohio, which is how I learned about comorbidity rates and was forced to reconsider Hailey’s astute question of whether or not I’m deeply unhappy. At the top of rb/depressedinohio is a pinned post reminding anyone who is in a crisis to dial 988. After that there’s a lot of posts with titles like “I’m Done” and “Pretty Sure I Can’t Anymore.” One is simply titled “This One Gets It,” and links to an old post created by burnedoutgirl.
ME
There is nothing wrong
With me.
Blood pressure
Normal
Heart rate
Normal
Weight
Normal
Temperature
Normal
They do not know
About the parts of me
They cannot weigh
That will not be measured.
The darkness inside
Growing like cancer
Living beside
Normal
As if it belonged there.
“What. The. Fuck,” I say, staring at my screen. It’s the thought that makes it to my mouth, the others—Get out of my head; Someone understands; Are you me?—stay inside in my skull. I read it again. Then again. These words are all familiar to me, but I would have never put them in this order, would never have conjured this strange magic.
Last year I fucked up my lower back and had to go to physical therapy. I complained about it until I met my PT, who was a hot chick. She told me she was going to touch my pressure points, then went wrist-deep into my glute. I’d stopped thinking about her hands, my ass, and anything other than not crying in public. She went in hard right where the pain was, and I was half a second from quitting on the masculine pride and asking her to stop when my muscle spasmed and let go. I’d melted on the table and asked her to marry me, to which she’d informed me there was a line, and I was at the back.
Burnedoutgirl’s poem is like that; a finger digging into the pressure point of my brain, forcing it to let go—and it did. I haven’t had a panic-inducing thought for the past ten minutes, which is a longer stretch than rb/dirtyslut has ever given me.
I click on her avatar and bang out a DM, even though it looks like she hasn’t posted in years. Euphoria and a sudden fear that she’s dead by now—yep, there you are, worst-case scenario, you bastard—making me plow ahead with no filter.
Hey you don’t know me and I’m sorry if this is weird, but your poem called “Me” could really be about me, too. I’m sure you get that all the time, but I needed to say it because I just saw this and it was like the time my physical therapist made my ass spasm—
“Okay, wait,” I say aloud, realizing that enough of Mom’s Ambien is still knocking around in my brain that I need to rethink my wording.
