Reality Sickness
Sick, real sick, like your whole body has become that pain you sometimes get in the back of your neck, in your wrist, sometimes, the one that won't go away when it decides to show up, only this time it's every part of your body that bends, and all the parts in between as well, and everything hurts to touch, like sandpaper and glass, and it's too warm except when it's too cold and it's confusing just to think at all, and there's pain in your stomach that might be hunger except the last time you ate it turned out it was a different sort of pain entirely and after the fourth trip to the bathroom you're wondering if you have any internal organs left, is there any part of you that hasn't convulsively forced itself out of your body through one end or the other, dear god, it's one thing for ass to taste like ass but you throw up enough your mouth tastes like ass and your skin feels like ass and the inside of your head sounds like ass and even the most rudimentary questions carry the weight of the ages, especially once the front of your face fills up with thick fluids, strands of gummy organic material that you just know, given time, will extend from your nose and maybe your eyes as well, stretching out in all directions like a spider web, and then little baby spiders will scuttle out all along the strands-- you know they will, you can feel them hatching in your throat, that must be what that horrible digging choking burrowing agony must be every time you try to swallow-- and you're wondering what Evil Wasp God you angered, to have been stung and paralyzed and curled up and left half-dead to be eaten by grubs like this and you try, your aching feverish hallucinating brain tries desperately to reach back and remember a day when you could stand upright, when you could support weight on your legs without hearing the rending scream of every little joint and muscle, when you could taste food and swallow it without shrieking, and know it wasn't going to explode out of your body in a transmuted state, like some sort of Reverse Transubstantiation of the Anti-Christ-- here, this was food, try and guess what it is now, hahaha-- and you can't, you can't remember a day like that, a day where every minute wasn't one or another form of misery (or more than one! please select all that apply...) and you think, heaven would be a place where I don't feel like this, if I died and went to heaven all I ask is that I don't feel like this when I'm there.
And then you take a shitload of drugs and they knock you on your ass and you get hella rehydrated and finally have a good night's sleep whether you want to or not, and when you wake up it's gone and you're not in pain and you can breath and think clearly and eat food and what you SHOULD be thinking is, Huh, I must have died in the night and gone to heaven. But you don't. Because you've already forgotten what yesterday's horror felt like. Some sort of stomach flu...?
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For consideration: short-term memory, coping with illness, things that make you beg for death, feverish hallucination
And then you take a shitload of drugs and they knock you on your ass and you get hella rehydrated and finally have a good night's sleep whether you want to or not, and when you wake up it's gone and you're not in pain and you can breath and think clearly and eat food and what you SHOULD be thinking is, Huh, I must have died in the night and gone to heaven. But you don't. Because you've already forgotten what yesterday's horror felt like. Some sort of stomach flu...?
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For consideration: short-term memory, coping with illness, things that make you beg for death, feverish hallucination