Sick

A Story by Circadian

Pretty much a life story I've kept secret all these years, but I'm tired of trying to keep it hidden.

I suppose that in my entire life I've been nothing but sick.

Sick from the day I was born, lips blue, unbreathing. The accidental second child of parents seemingly too old to be having babies, now going to die right there on the table if they couldn't get her to take a f*****g breath. She did, eventually, but the incubators were her only friends for the next two weeks.

My sickness continued as I was in and out of hospitals from the time I was a baby until the time I was in middle school. Dragged from waiting room to waiting room, test after test, vial after vial of blood drawn, pill after pill, surgery after surgery, cold unfamiliar smiles of doctor after doctor telling me yet another diagnosis as my mother slid her cold, shaking hand down my hair.

Finally it turned around. No more frantic drives to the hospital. No more medicines forced down my throat. But then the circles came, running under my eyes as nights passed increasingly without sleep. I was irritable, I was that weird kid everyone avoided. I couldn't keep my thoughts from racing. They said it was my brain, that I needed meds that only made me sleep less, a virtual zombie during the day.

As my thirteenth year passed into my fourteenth, a new sickness decided to weave it's way through my skull. It planted crippling ideas in me. One moment I was fine, the next curled in a corner, too scared of myself to move. This wasn't something that happened to me. These black thoughts were something that happened to faces I didn't know, people you saw in commercials and on the news.

It was okay, at first. I'd learned to deal with it just like any of the other sicknesses that came about. Then it plunged. I had to hide myself or they'd know. I was a smile, a comedian, a perfect student with nothing to worry about. I felt that way most of the time, but the lows were lower. I was getting sicker. They noticed the scratches, but I told them it was the cat and for some screwed-up, idiotic reason they believed me.

I couldn't take it anymore. I was sick of life, sick of keeping this in. So I told them. That night was the lowest low of my life. That night I was physically sick for hours, crunched against the wall in a fight. Not two days later and all of them knew what I'd done, what I was going to do all along.

The words of a song drilled themselves into my gut, once again making me sick. My hands shook and I was forced to stay still, something not connecting between my muscles and my brain. My heart pounded, cold sweat stuck hair to my face. Every muscle ached in my chest as I finally was freed, only to curl into myself and force painful breaths in and out. How could something as simple as a song have done this? Why was I so powerless against this black, untamed monster?

I was sick. I am sick. I will always be sick. But that doesn't mean it's over.