A UNIVERSE UNMADE

I've struggled with anxiety for the last ten years or so. It began with a fainting episode I had working at the coffee plant. I was sitting at my desk sifting through paperwork as I had each day for the last year and a half, and suddenly, without warning, I felt my consciousness slipping. It wasn’t a dizzy feeling. Nothing was spinning. Rather, I felt heavy. My head, specifically, felt about a hundred pounds heavier than the rest of my body which set me horribly off balance. I thought I was going to die. My friend and fellow supervisor Florés propped me up against his shoulder and walked my limp body outside to the parking lot where Mandi's car was idling. She peeled out of there and sped me to the urgent care facility as I shoved smelling salts up my nose and prayed to god that I stay conscious just a bit longer.

Once we arrived, a nurse laid me down and took my blood pressure. Then a doctor came in and pricked my finger. He looked at the little device in his hand and told me I had diabetes. He signed a prescription for Glucoformin and got me the hell out of there. I felt relieved on the ride home. It was good to know what the problem was and, therefore, the treatment required to feel normal again. Later that week, however, my GP did a blood panel that said otherwise. According to the test results, I was the healthiest man alive. The ailment only existed in my mind. So, my GP wrote me a prescription for Paxil and Lorazepam and took me to a cabinet in the hall where he handed me a half dozen “free samples” of Cymbalta. On my way out, he said with a smile that I would have to take these for the rest of my life.

Bullshit. Those pills didn’t work at all, or at least not as described on the bottle. Cymbalta gave me convulsions, and the Lorazepam liquefied my personality to the level of waffle iron. I quit both after two weeks. As for the Paxil, I poured my previously unopened bottle into the toilet and flushed.

Still, I kept fainting at work. I felt as though my heavy head would pull me down through the floor, right to the center of the Earth. Eventually, I was laid off, sent packing. The higher-ups didn’t trust me after my father, the department manager, quit earlier that year in his usual bombastic, no—notice fashion. They thought I was faking it, that I was sticking it to them, but nothing could be further from the truth. I loved that job more than any other I’ve had to this day. My time as a Roundtable Delivery Driver comes close, but that’s only because I was 21, 22, 23 years of age. My love for that job is undoubtedly a rose-tinted reflection of the intrepidness of my youth, finishing shifts on two pitchers of beer, mopping floors off the clock so my coworkers and I could leave earlier and cut across the street to Stars Bowling Alley where we’d trade round after round of cocktails and beer, and I would pilfer the drinks of strangers too busy bowling to notice.

Those were glorious, immortal days. They happened so long ago, it feels as though someone else lived them, someone else free of the Fear that inevitably arrives with age…

I had a weird episode today. It was a step above my usual Wednesday or Thursday when the demons and arbiters of karmic debt emerge from the shadows and pull me down deep into existential dread. I was eating breakfast — a sausage coated in mozzarella — and by the last few bites, I had forgotten how to swallow. I went for a drink of water, but I couldn't swallow that either. Then I walked to the bathroom, but stopped halfway, suddenly unaware of the strength and coordination needed to walk effectively. I began stumbling, moaning, blathering incoherently. I felt my mind floating up from my body. There was an increasing lag between motor function and brain impulse. I became scared. I went into the bedroom and sat on the bed to catch my breath, but I had forgotten how to breathe. And so, each breath came as labored, intentional, and uncomfortably warm. I looked up at the window, at the backlit blinds, and I saw electrons of both positive and negative charges zipping around like angry flies, swarming and colliding with one another, creating, as if by sheer accident, the fundamental laws of the universe. And I saw myself swirling in the center of it all. A universe made and unmade for my misfortune. Ridiculous. I managed to close the window before my mind could escape.