Symptoms

2 February 2006 | second person, stress | 1 Comment

Stress manifests in the body. You spend up to an hour upon waking lying on your back to stretch it out and banish any pain. Your forehead is breaking out with more zits than you’ve had at any point since high school. The latest symptom may be food poisoning. You’ve had diarrhea since this morning.

The future is more uncertain than it has been. There is a hole where several of your coworkers once were and it is unnerving. Your immediate peer is even more affected than you are for various reasons. You’ve always tried to take her under your wing at this place, but you don’t have any words of advice this time.

Your sleep schedule has shifted because you’ve had to get up earlier than normal for meetings and classes. Today, while trying to not fall asleep in class, you stare at the sawtooth cut of the vinyl of your wingtips. You picture running your fingers along the uneven edges, and imagine the sensation doing so would cause. So much so that you feel the tingling in your fingertips without even moving. You think maybe the food poisoning is altering your state of consciousness. The food poisoning is making you high.

You even looked green yesterday. Your coworkers say as much. You think about passing on dinner tonight. Stress manifests in the body: your appetite is gone, your fingertips still tingle even without the thought of sawtooth patterns. This might be a headache, or it might be a lack of food, or sleep, or both.

1 Comment

  1. Jason D- said on 4 Feb 2006 at 7:04 pm:

    Life’s too short for that kind of bullshit man.

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