#I don’t think crustacean cw is anything | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

nrpa2017-blog · 5 years

Text

And Then It Was All Done (an excerpt)

CW: Chronic Pain, Chronic Illness

The rest of the day was a hazy oscillation between sleep, judging, and the steady drip of blood. She awoke at 7:30 PM to judge her final round which began at 8:00, drank an Ensure, ate a banana, went to the bathroom, took a swig of Pepto Bismol, and called an Uber back to the tournament.

“Can you email the tournament to see if they can minimize the number of rounds that I judge tomorrow?” she texted Martino when she finally arrived. “I’m really not feeling well.”

“Yeah, you should reach out to the tournament director,” he responded. “The email is online. Just tell them that Peter can judge for you.”

The round had started, and a very short boy was telling a very tall girl that she should “think about reading the news if she wanted to be good at an activity like this.” The girl was on the verge of tears. The room was cold, and her vision was starting to blur, the voices of the debaters muddling together into a subtle whir. She could feel the cardboard dryness of an imminent or already descended cold likely set off by the immunosuppressant effect of her medication, and her skin seemed to vibrate and tremble against the keyboard, her breath a hot kind of fuzziness. “It is awful to feel that you do not know where your anxiety comes from,” her friend had told her, and she did not know if this feeling of dissolving was the loss of blood, the steroids, the lack of sleep, or a failure of her will.

“Hey Peter,” she messaged him. “I hate to do this to you, but do you mind judging some of my rounds tomorrow? I really wouldn’t ask if I was doing any better.” The flesh of her cheeks had started to burn red hot, and her eyes seemed they would soon lose the power to peer outwards. Her hand scribbled notes on the paper, but she was now floating above the desk in an electrified cloud of deep orange-yellow light, a staggering survivor of a lightning storm within her own veins with the ultimate aim of eviscerating her outermost layer of skin.

“Of course, you really don’t have to say sorry,” he replied. “I don’t mind! You need rest.”

She thought of the first time she’d gotten sick in junior year of high school, when he’d wrapped his arms around her stomach and kissed her neck until the pain finally subsided, when he’d told her to stop apologizing for being unable to do things that required exertion because she was too weak. “I love you so much, Nora,” he’d told her. “Please don’t feel bad. This isn’t your fault.” Did he remember this, how much she’d loved him then? It was strange to think of memories as having no location, no home besides the space between two people. What if this was really the last time they saw each other?

She sent the email to the tournament director.

“Thank you so much. I really can’t tell you how much I appreciate it,” she told Peter.

“I’m always happy to help, really. I’m so sorry for everything that you’re going through right now.”

And maybe it was just the pain and the nausea and the dizziness, but tears were now dripping down her face, burning against the hotness of her skin. Because there was a part of him that still loved her. The debaters would talk about her after, probably. Nora sobbing in the back of the debate round. Nora floating, melting, falling apart! She used to be so good, so strong! Look how far people can fall. But she was not there anymore, drifting out of her skin, looking down at the decaying flesh marinating in what used to be her place.

“Please take care of yourself, Nora,” the tournament director emailed her back, almost immediately. “We can have someone to replace you for the next round so you can go home and rest. We’ll make sure you don’t have to judge tomorrow.”

20 minutes later, the round was over. She managed to articulate her decision, informed the debaters sitting outside the room that someone would be replacing her as a judge in the next round. She went to the Walgreens near the building to buy more Pepto Bismol, Imodium, and a four-pack of Ensures. After, she called an Uber back to the hotel, where she doubled her dose of Melatonin. She did not know what came first: the disintegration into sleep, or her collapse into the bed, but she was glad that in sleep she did not have to carry the weight of her body.

★★★

Nora dreamt that it was the end of the world and the blood wouldn’t stop pouring. So, she sat in the center of her hotel bed as her stomach caved open, as the walls transformed into the ones within Peter’s old house where they first smoked weed and he first made her come. She noticed the Endless Summer poster, the record player in the corner, the worn copy of Cat’s Cradle he always said he would lend her. It began to rain.

And then it was that scent again, the one she never thought she would smell. Lavender and boy. He was there sitting next to her, eyes no longer carved out, his smile warm, wearing that shirt with the horse that she loved.

“Nora, I’m so sorry,” he pushed a piece of tear-stained hair behind her ear.

“Peter,” she said, and leaned into his chest. “Do you think it would be okay if you held me?” Her eyes were puffy and full of salt, swollen with the accumulation of water.

“Always,” he said, and she thought about the immense weight of the word. Must it be repeated or was it a perpetual promise? She watched the water seep through the pores of the hotel room, entwining itself around her limbs as the room became submerged, the white bedsheets taking form in the room’s watery depths.

“It is weird to not know when I’ll see you next,” she said. The warmth of his breath against her neck broke through the density of the coolness that surrounded them.

“Yeah,” he whispered. “I know.”

“I don’t know if I can be friends with you.” The words dripped out softly, milky white in the luminescent darkness.

“I know. But I hope that we can get there, maybe someday. I’ll always love you, Nora.”

She looked out as the room’s walls disintegrated, noticed that they were now in the space at the bottom of the ocean where rocks compress upon themselves, where the water was hot, where only luminescent shrimp with thick layers of armor can live, anything else boiled beneath the pressure. She was a sea anemone, her skin dislocated and floating in the cavern of the room, her skin crawling with shells and crustaceans, hot orange vines twisting in between her toes.

She thought an awful lot about precipices, brinks, the moment before you look out and say, “and then it was all done.” She’d imagined this, thought: it will feel like exploding, disintegration, evisceration, like your body was made up only of stars all along and you didn’t even know. Had she finally arrived?

“Yeah. Me too,” she said, and this time, she was not spineless. “I’ll always love you too.”

#chronic pain #chronic illness #writing

0 notes