Pain Level 8

My life is a roller coaster with no attendant to hit the stop button in case of emergency. Some days I just roll along without much excitement and some days I’m a 4 year old screaming “oh shit” as I plummet off a cliff. Cross your fingers that it stays on the tracks. 

One day I got sick and I never got better. My body was silently plotting against me from the day I was born. My blood vessels are a red climbing rose wrapped around my trellis of cranial nerves. The thorns have worn through the finish and the vine is wrapped a bit too tightly in places. Nobody prepares you for this. I have a lifetime of getting better under my belt. I know how to do that. This? I don’t know how to do this. There’s no handbook for telling the doctor there aren’t enough lines to list your medications. Or for finding the pre-surgery checklist routine. They don’t give you a box to put your guilt in when you spend another week doing nothing but laying in bed, because taking a shower on Tuesday took every ounce of energy you had. And if we’re being honest you sat down and cried during that shower when nobody could see you because it’s the only time you are truly alone these days and you don’t want anyone to know that it’s still that bad. 

Being friends with me takes more work but it’s worth it. I’m the kind of friend who can blow smiles out of smoke rings and affix them to every face in the room. I only wear dresses with pockets so I can pull favors out for my friends. My ears are iPhones that will listen all night while you talk about the boyfriend you should have dumped months ago. I’ll develop a stutter to tell you everyday you are worth it if that’s what it takes to get you to believe it. 
My veins pump Sodium Pentothal so I will always tell you the truth. My fingers are wands and I can make magic appear in your texts. The catch is, you will have to accept bits and pieces of me. I’ve been ripped apart and I’m only strong enough to hold the pieces together all at once occasionally. I’m a thing best admired from afar. 

Pain is liquid and it washes over me every single day of my life. “Baseball bat wrapped in electrified barbed wire repeatedly beating me in the cheek,” “ice pick to my eye,” “hot knife sliding into my ear and poking my eardrum;” these are just some of the words I assign to something nobody else will fully understand. I beg for mercy and big pharma answers. I say yes when I’m asked if there is relief but that is a lie. There is never relief. The fear of drowning never goes away. 

Alone. 

Sick me swallowed healthy me whole. Prescription meds and a brain surgery were all I needed for a stomach large enough to hold her. Maybe she was too skinny. I’m definitely too fat. This cruel disease forces a choice: skinny and in pain or fat and in less pain. Vanity be damned whatever it takes to ease the pain. Skinny me is still screaming inside like a prisoner of war. I wonder how long until she gives up?