Side Effects

The non-properly-embodied feeling you get when you have a high fever or the flu, only without the flu, at least you think.

Things hurt. Muscles. But only vaguely. Like fatigue. Like after running. Only different. Subtle. Illegible.

Dizzy. For you the flavor isn't electric; you can't get any clearer than "weird." The head rush you have when you stand up... only MORE RUSHING. And fast. Just a tiny moment in time where there is a slipping sideways into prickly disembodied fizziness, almost like something you've experienced before but not quite.

You call people. Your ex-boyfriend, say. You write long e-mails, to people you work for or with. Long and chatty and soliciting help.

You remember that you used to do this a lot: call, write long e-mails. PEOPLE were your Lexapro. Not that this is as healthy as it sounds. "I'm the least difficult of men, all I want is boundless love!"

Sometimes there's nausea, but it's in the wrong place: high up, your diaphragm. On an X-ray, your stomach would glow green.

You go for a spontaneous aftenoon drink with a friend. The waitron is clearly a beer drinker, knows nothing about cocktails. She asks if you want your martini ON THE ROCKS and you, befuddled, say, uhm, yes? She brings it to you in a double-shot glass.

This is not a martini.

After chatting over nothings with your friend you feel so open that you write an apology on paper and prop it under someone's mailbox. You wouldn't feel comfortable living like this: in a house anyone can just enter from the street, put anything in your mailbox, walk right up to your apartment at the top of the stairs.

You write a long long letter in response to your potential-director's request to meet. Oh yes. You were a PhD candidate. This feels like it was in another life.

Like a backpack, for a day, you put that life back on. Will-there-be-teaching-for-me-next-semester? Please-sir-I'd-like-some-more, with a respectful bob of the head? You feel terrible, like a prisoner. Guilty. I did it: it was me. I didn't finish my exams in a timely fashion, I had one foot out the door! But I am sorry for my transgressions.

You stay up later, and get up earlier.

You write in second person.

It's a sunny morning, near the unblemished bowl of bananas and the Asiatic lily. You are drinking coffee, but it feels like whiskey. Why are you writing in second person? You feel weird. You are writing noir.

Your cheeks are kind of hot. Maybe it is a little fever. You can't explain the difference, really. Your therapist asked, last week, before you even felt weird, before you decided to skip this week's therapy. You couldn't find words to make them meet. "It's not that the moods are HIGHER or LOWER. It's that they're on... a completely different scale."

It's early. It still could go either way.

Meditation has given you a homunculous. This homunculous, fortunately, can do your laundry at the laundromat, gas the car, purchase your evening sandwich for the commute, prep your lesson, write individual responses to their recent test scores, even if you can't.

It doesn't hurt.