Everything is broken.

Broken bottles, broken plates,
Broken switches, broken gates,
Broken dishes, broken parts,
Streets are filled with broken hearts.
Broken words never meant to be spoken,
Everything is broken.
Seem like every time you stop and turn around
Something else just hit the ground
- Bob Dylan



I don’t know if I’m awake because I can’t bear another minute of tossing and turning or because I’m simply afraid of sleep. I don’t like the idea of being completely vulnerable, an easy target to whatever forces I can’t explain. Even when there is nothing left, I continue to look for that sense of nothingness. If I’d stopped for a minute, stop smoking and drugging, stopped chasing and fleeing, would this heaviness be lifted? In my heart I knew it probably wouldn’t, that this is bigger than me.


At 3am actual pain started to kick in. I curled up in a fetal position on the bathroom floor and grimaced audibly. It hurt from all sides, my back, my chest, even my shins. A sense of nausea took over and I begin to heave. After throwing up several times in that half hour, I curled up, bent my knees and pulled my thighs to my chest, bunching myself up behind the bathroom door. My throat was raw and I desperately needed a drink of water but I reached out and lit a cigarette instead. The hot flashes of excruciating pain were infuriating and I thought to myself I am definitely getting punished.


I wasn’t going to move. I’d wanted to see how painful it would get, how far whatever would go to torture me, how much I could take. Because maybe this physical pain gave me a bizarre, creepy sense of relief, maybe because I felt I deserved it. But in the next 2 hours the headache got tiresome so I picked myself up off the floor, got up, and looked for my phone. Without thinking twice I sent a text to Fye asking him to call me if he was awake and that I needed to see a doctor urgently. He called within 15 minutes and in another 15, he had picked me up and we were on our way to the nearest 24 clinic.


So now here I am, after getting a jab, a variety of not-so interesting looking pills and test results to dread, blogging. You would think that after breaking out in cold sweat for the past 6 hours while cringing and whimpering, one would take their medicine and unquestioningly head to bed. But I have too many questions, too unpleasant to bring to bed with.


Here I am, the medication at my side, and I’m wondering if I should take them. In fact, I don’t know why I allowed the doctor to administer the jab if its objective was to ease the pain. Truth be told I don’t want to feel better physically, because it would only make me feel worse when it comes to everything else.


The funny this is, I’m not alone. I’m sure there is one other person out there who would have the same thoughts running in her head. And it’s even funnier because I worry for her, as I’m sure she is worrying for me. Even with this shrewd knowledge of each other’s black wave we can’t do anything but to watch the other sink deeper. As much we want to yank each other out of this, I guess we know that the force in the median might just be too strong for us to handle. Hence, two people who hate change. Change means adapting, and how would we adapt when we are never even comfortable in our own skin, to begin with?


So the question is, how long can we stay, in different countries no less, in this miserable détente?