Life Off

Half past seven, you wake up. You feel simultaneously very heavy and light as a feather. You sit. A gyroscope spins in your head and you feel as if you have been holding your breath, but you haven't.

You drink coffee. Before you empty the cup, the spinning in you head starts spitting off thoughts. This one runs there. That one cuts across its path here. Another shoots by, close enough to knock you off balance. You scramble to chase them.

Standing, the floor rocks. You heel-toe down the hall, holding the wall. You are not hung over. You drank nothing but water the night before. A basket overturns in your head and a million tasks spill in front of you. Each task is an unrolling scroll. Higher up, a bowl tips, sloshing letters that clump into words. You must order them all.

You get to the computer. You find your notebook. List all of the tasks. Write them down. They must be done. Today. You feel the energy to get them done. They know. They all demand to be done right away.

Begin. Chase them. Write, write, write. You must get both hands to work on separate lists. You must enlist your feet. Alas, only one list at a time. No, one task at a time. No! Go back to the list because you are forgetting things in the space between the spill in the head and the ink on the page. Start something! No! Something else! Agitation replaces energy. Anxiety replaces agitation.

All the wrong thoughts catch. Anger sparks, flickers, smolders into sadness. You can do everything. You can do nothing. Your gathered scattered thoughts keep tumbling out of your arms, across the floor, out of the room. The agitation is better than the gloom. The agitation has energy. You fear the funk, the existential funk, the dark blue gunk glopping over your brain.

Go work out. You walk, powered by your bitching the whole way. Bitching, fueled by annoyance, can run a straight line. Your companion does not want you to follow that line. He changes the subject. He changes it again, and then again, to keep you from obsessing on the wrong thoughts.

You shower. You have calmed. The anxiety naps. Your head still feels fluffy, but you have something like a list. Follow it. The list will give you focus. You can't get to the list yet because you have to write. Not your work. A blog post connected to the smoldering sadness of anger blocks the other thoughts. You get this blog post out of your head. The jittery tapping of typing fits. You can survive for the duration.

You finish. You feel bands gripping your insides, spanning your middle. They hold you together. You shiver, your entire body aching from tension, as if you were in freezing cold weather, but you are not cold. You are, in fact, quite warm. You can't relax.

You take your list. Focus on the road. Focus. You focus so much that you take the wrong path. You correct. Focus. Focus. Task one. Task two. Task three.

You forgot to itemize task three. You knew that you knew what you needed in task three. You had picked up your notebook to make the list. Then another thought dashed in, needed attention. Right now. You didn't go back to the list. Now, you wander around, hoping your memory will jog. The music makes you sad. You can't stop thinking about how sad. The gyroscope spins again. You try to take deep breaths but your chest feels so heavy, so inflexible, unable to expand enough. The air is insufficient.

You return. You remember task four.

"Hi, I called two days ago. No one called me back. It was about my prescriptions."

The girl on the other end sounds professional. Not always the case. "Yes," she says, "Your name."

"Clio. Clio Bluestocking," you say. "I am out of town. I have an appointment when I return. Before I left, I had an appointment and the doctor gave me two refills. I went to get them refilled. The CVS here called the CVS there. The CVS there said the refills had expired. The CVS here called your office. Your office wouldn't refill; but I had those two refills prescribed. I called on Monday. I'm getting a little worried. It's been a week since I'm out. I'm not feeling right."

"May I have a number where you can be reached," she asks. "I will leave the doctor a message."

You give her your number. You give her the number of the CVS. You remind her that you called on Monday. You refrain from begging.

"We will call you back to let you know the status," she says.

You suspect no one has looked at your chart. You suspect because you usually have to tell the doctor what you are taking and in what doses when you visit. You suspect because you often have to remind the doctor that you are on Happy Pills AND Energy Pills when she writes out the prescription for only one. You suspect that "must come in for an appointment" is the standard answer, without consultation, when a pharmacy calls in for refill, regardless of the patient. Regardless of the medication. Regardless of the next appointment scheduled.

You worry that, when you re-scheduled the last appointment -- the one that you insisted on making for August knowing that you would be out-of-town, but they insisted on making for July and told you to just reschedule later if you weren't going to be in town -- the person with whom you spoke did not, in fact, reschedule; or she gave you the new appointment but didn't cancel the last and so now the doctor thinks that you are skipping appointments and still trying to get meds. You suspect because the person kept putting you on hold, dropping the call, and behaving in general as if she didn't have time for you.

Your head spins. You become angry. Your thoughts tumble over one another. You become sad. You are certain that you breathe, but you feel like you aren't getting enough air. You become happy. You watch your hands. The shaking will being any second. You cry when Morgan Freeman reads Invictus as Jason Bourne tours the prison. You hold your breath so you will not sob out loud, beyond reason, and alarm your companion.

You try to sleep. You compose more blog posts, e-mails, paper proposals in your head. You try to shut them down. Focus on your breaths. In. Out. Still not enough air. Out. In. You jostle awake from a bad dream. Your body tenses against the freezing cold, but the air is mild.

You know life on and life off. You know the difference. You know that you cannot take life off. You don't know how you survived life off for 23 years. You understand why breaks since were so disastrous. Four weeks until the next appointment. Four weeks to face the doctor chastising you. Four weeks to get the damn prescription. Four weeks of work lost, just trying to hold your insides in place. Four weeks of the crazy trying to alienate your companion. Four weeks of exhaustion trying to hold the crazy in.

You wait. In two minutes the clock will chime 9. Your hope that the phone will ring holds you together. One minute. Counting. You wait. 9 am. You wait.

You still wait.