I have been laying on the couch for the past few hours, switching between trying to read a book, daydreaming, and feeling my body pour itself down one side of the couch while slowly heating up.

I have a low grade fever that came out of nowhere. Since the past hour, it has become much worse.

I feel like I am in a constant state of vertigo and overwhelmed by nausea. There is a knot in my stomach that won’t go away, and my throat is dried-up. Weirdly enough, I can’t consider having a sip of water even if I were to randomly unlock the telekinetic ability to pull said water bottle to me from inside the refrigerator; though that would be pretty cool.

WEEEEE-WOOOOOO-WEEeeeee

“That’s for me!”—is my usual immediate thought whenever I hear an ambulance riding through my neighbourhood. That thought is usually followed by an inner chuckle of “Hah, no, it’s not! It could never be. Who would even call it?”

I had this thought a few times lately, ever since I have been getting sicker and sicker with not the slightest positive sign that I’d ever manage to get back into a decent physical condition.

At this point, I am not sure I even want to.

“Fuck you!” I say and point a finger up at the spinning ceiling, then twist my body to the left. If God hates me, perhaps gravity would be kinder.

I am so tired of dealing with this feeling of edging death that I consider to stop fighting that survival instinct all together; you know, the one that kicks in whenever you are so sick that all your brain can cook up is ‘call an ambulance’.

An ambulance like the ones that keep riding outside my window.

A few weeks back, I got woken up at the crack of dawn by one of them. It happens more often then I want it to, and they’re always for the same one elderly person living in the building across mine.

Still dazed, I pulled the curtains back to peek at it, and did so just in time to see a zipped up bag being pushed inside it on a stretcher.

“Ugh—you’re teasing me!” I groaned. “Seriously, is anybody else seeing this shit? It’s like my neighbours are teasing me!”

The funniest part about this ordeal for me—the one about me fighting my own survival instincts in favour of surrendering to the utter exhausting feeling of inching death—is the zoomed out, big-picture view I imagine of myself rotting away inside an apartment in front of which ambulances pass multiple times a day.

Haha, yeah. Plausible. After all, these knots keep building up from the bottom of my stomach all the way to the peak of my throat like my esophagus suddenly decided to get French braids. If that actually were the case, I wonder if whomever would notice it during my autopsy would pull it out, preserve it, and send it to be displayed in one of these cool human anatomy museums.

“Maybe then I could finally be recognized for my art!”

“Maybe not even that could make it interesting enough either..”

The air feels hot. Hotter than it was minutes before.

I cannot breathe in it.

And I am now, once again, pulled into this eerie survival mode in which my body taps into some stored bit of awareness out of nowhere—perhaps because it senses this shit is not right—that is just enough it would need to pull itself up and dial an emergency number.

I inch myself up on my elbows and throw a glance around the room.

“Wh..whaat..th..e…”.

The room is warping in all sorts of melting translucent wave forms, like a mirage in the middle of the desert.

Everything is blending together and losing color.

I cannot make out any shapes.

Saliva runs down in an attempt to soothe my throat, and I use that last bit of backup strength to push the cell phone as far away as I can from me, with the heel of my palm, until it feels out of reach.

Screw. You.

I feel weak, I feel myself fall, and everything fades to black.

*

That familiar voice comes to me.

“…why did you do that?”

“YOU!” I growl and stomp over in its face. “Fuck YOU for avoiding me! I have been trying to get in touch with you for so long already and got not even a word back. But joke’s on you, now you have to answer me!”