{This and the entries around it are excerpts from my journal, written during the return of my 6 month curse. Approximately every 6 months I hurt myself in some sort of spectacular fashion, usually necessitating a hospital visit. This time, though, the injury was a bit more spectacular than usual.}
There are eight hours left till morning. It’s strange how, even with a window, I no longer judge time by the presence of light in my room. My time is determined by the flow of visitors outside, by the delivery of meals, by how often I can raise myself to refill my water, by the sultry turns of the balloon above my bed, bright with mass-produced greetings. But if anything it is worse at night. At night all the cues drop away and I’m left with the chipper click of the second hand and the weight of my burgeoning fever.
Push it down. Swallow it up. It’s not there if you don’t admit it.
I need to get out of here. There’s too much blank, too much nothingness. Everything is white noise and my brain is already starting to rebel, replacing emptiness with patterns so exquisite they make my bones ache. Robotic tendrils cradle skeletal figures, entwining supplely but somehow angularly, polished steel ratcheting into extended curves that twist and draw the eyes.
I’m too tired to redirect the flow and I’m drawn into the jungle, the smell of oil thick on my skin, gibbering faces hanging in the polished underbrush. The metal is always moving- growing, gorging- pulsing with the beat of my overwrought heart. It’s beating too hard. Too fast. It’s urging the mechanical vines higher into the sky until everything is a tangled web of iron and smoke.
The sound of the clock pulls me back to the surface, sweaty and a little nauseous. A hand flies up to check the heat of my forehead, but it doesn’t feel as if I’ve spiked a real fever yet. Maybe.
I want to go home. Go away fever.
It sounds like a refrain in my head. I’m stuck on repeat, phrases cycling through again and again, requiring a force of will to halt them and all my strength is currently focused on a probably futile attempt to control my body temperature. If I just concentrate I know I can do it. Screw the infection blossoming in my blood, the antibiotics will take care of that eventually.
I can see the infection in my head, bacteria cuddling close to my kidneys like an aging cat lounging on a pillow in the sun. Kneading its claws softly into the cloth, pushing deeper into my gut.
The world feels off. Spinning even. The world is being swept out from under me.
I turn my head to glance at the liquids flowing through the tubing down into my arm. In a small vial near the swollen bag a steady drip catches my eye and I watch it. Right now I’m content to focus on this. Here is one solid thing to get me through the night. A steady drop of liquid, the transfer of the weaponry of modern medicine from its plastic to my blood.
Here is how I will judge time, by a calculation of volume. A rate of change of liquid from a simple medicinal bag to a magical potion that will feed my strength. It glitters in the light that seeps through the hospital door.
First star to the right, then straight on till morning.