One late fall morning, you wake up and everything is the usual, until you want to get dressed and realize your entire life has gotten so small, you don’t fit into it anymore, no matter how much you wiggle and squeeze and tuck and suck in your belly. And yet, it’s still the only life you have, so you make do.
And with time, you, too, make yourself smaller and smaller, hoping your life will fit you again, but, no, your life gets even smaller, and much faster than you can keep up with.
Suddenly, it’s just the width of a post stamp, the length of height of a snail’s house
It’s a small stamp, a small snail,
The horrifying thing about it is that it happens so quietly, unnoticeably:
Last week was stressful,
Maybe I ate something wrong,
The trip was too intense,
I probably didn’t sleep well enough,
Or eat healthily enough,
Today is a good day, surely I’ve just been making all of this up,
Maybe it’s the flu,
Maybe I got covid,
Just get through this week, then things will surely get better,
Just get through this week,
Next week things will get better,
Just get through this week,
Next week things will get better,
Just get through this week,
Next week things will get better.
It wasn’t.
They didn’t.
And that’s how a year goes by, and another, and another. Until one day, you realize that it’s been weeks since you’ve texted anyone back, months since you last saw a friend, half a year of sleeping like crap, and over a year since the last time you didn’t just crash on the couch after work, and over two years of “surely next week things will get better.” From there, it will take you another nine months, 45 canceled friend dates, 43 vials of blood, 32 doctors visits in 108 hours, 31 instances of “we don’t know”, seven of “you’re too young for this,” three of “you just need to learn to live with the pain,” two hospital stays, 113 pages of labs and reports and doctors letters, 24 tried and failed medications, 6 newly-discovered medication allergies, 1 x-ray, 1 CT, 7 MRIs, 2 minor surgeries, 116 hours of online research, 265 hours of wondering if it’s all in your head, and 18 instances of breaking down crying in doctors offices, bringing you to a total of three years and two months until you realize that it was three years ago when you last rode your bike for more than five miles, and another six days until there’s a name for it, a name you’ve been certain about for two months, but as you lie in the exam room (you weren’t able to sit anymore), the fact that a doctor is saying the name changes nothing at first, and probably won’t for a very long time, there’s no treatment, there’s no cure, but at least