by Laynee Wessel
I woke up screaming again. My chest was heaving and my shirt was soaked with sweat. I could tell that I’d been crying from the ache in my eyes and pounding in my head. I had pin pricks on the inside of my skin and a scraping feeling in my throat and my pillows were soaked. Sweat or tears, I couldn’t tell. I had to piss. I always have to fucking piss.
I’d gotten used to taking a logical inventory of the physical feelings in my body. I’d been saying for weeks that something was wrong with me, that I was sick, but no one believed me, so I started making lists of what they do to me. I guess it just made me look crazier. But I swear, it feels like my blood is trying to escape my skin, pushing like it’s looking for an exit. I think I would know if that was real or not. According to my doctor, though, I wouldn’t.
There wasn’t anything medically wrong with me, he said. Psychosomatic, he said, like that made it fake. Like I was a fucking joke. My blood read normal for every test they ran—if they ran any at all, if I could trust them to tell me the truth. All the nurses, doctors—they had this look in their eyes. Concern, or something. Always talking about my “mental wellbeing,” like I wasn’t in the room. I felt like a fucking joke.
I wish they didn’t think I was crazy, but how can I change their minds when no one wants to listen to me? They’re always telling me to breathe, or drink more water, or lose weight, like that will do anything to soothe my burning blood. Like any of it will do anything to get the fucking disease out of me. But they don’t think it’s a disease. I see the way they look at me when I start scratching my skin or excuse myself to the bathroom when they make me throw up. The few times they’ve even talked to me, they acted like I was some kind of problem. But I am to them. Of course they think I’m crazy when I start talking about little alien agents attacking my insides. Of course they suppress scoffs when I tell them that my blood isn’t mine anymore.
It’s too personal. Blood is about as inside your body as you can get. They don’t want to hear about my blood. It reminds them too much that I’m human and that they’re human and that they can get these things too. You know what? I hope they do, and I hope no one believes them.
I don’t know what they are, the things ruining my life, but I know they can swim. I can feel them, all the time, swimming in me, scraping against the underside of my skin and making me itch. Keeping me from sleep. Not even bleeding is a relief anymore. Water helps, sometimes. Food doesn’t. I imagine them laughing at me, whatever they are, growing fatter off of my blood and loving every second of it. I imagine that they hate me. Cruel little bastards.
They do a lot of things to me. They make my body ache and creak and burn. They make me want to piss and they make me want to puke. They make me want to lie down and never get up. I can’t leave my house anymore because I think about them too much and get distracted. My friends don’t like me anymore, anyway. So I get my groceries and my medicine delivered and spend every day in the dark, trying to make myself eat because they can’t win. But god, do they try and win.
I got up out of bed and rushed to the bathroom to quell the urge to empty my stomach. This happens sometimes when I think about them too long, the sudden urge to vomit. My stomach roiled with sickness and probably anxiety, trying to reject whatever I ate the previous day, but nothing came up. They don’t like when I eat certain things. Fruit, bread, potatoes. They punish me, harshly. They suck the water out of my cells with their little nano-hands and make me vomit. My doctor is convinced I have an eating disorder because my throat is so raw from stomach acid. But I’m not letting them win. I’m not even playing their game.
Nothing came up. But it left a rancid taste in my mouth anyway, and a burning feeling. But that feeling is a victory. They don’t like when I eat fries, so I eat fries and let them sit in their hatred. I leaned onto the toilet seat, panting and still dry heaving, listening to the little plops of saliva into the water, my hair hanging down, stringy and too greasy to tangle and dripping with sweat. It took me a minute to stand. They made me weak. I felt weak. I tried to walk past the sink without noticing the mirror.
But, eventually I glanced up into the mirror to face a monster. A monster with a gaunt face and cracked lips, shining red with blood. Was its skin yellow or was that just the light? Tears poured down its face. What a pathetic thing.
I knew it was me. I’m not crazy. I just can’t think of myself that way. I’m a knight, a soldier fighting against an invasion, not a brittle, broken monster. A scowl that hid more tears tugged at its mouth and its nostrils flared.
With a scream I punched it. I decided it couldn’t exist anymore. I hit it again and again and again until the mirror was nothing but shards and my knuckles were nothing but raw skin and blood. Blood that was now pooling on the glass.
I could see them in the blood, dancing in their scarlet pools.
They were laughing at me.
Laynee Wessel (she/he/they) is an undergraduate student pursuing a bachelor’s degree in creative writing at Oklahoma State University. Their work seeks to explore themes of fear and grief through surreal imagery. Their work is the recipient of the PTA Reflections Contest National Award of Excellence and also features in Oakland Arts Review.