Every morning I wake up with a brick or with a bubble inside my chest. It’s a bubble that feels like a brick that has fallen from great height and broken off into so many pieces, now floating around my chest. Fragile. Sharp.
This isn’t a metaphorical description but a physical one. I wake up and feel like there is something in my chest. A cold heat. A lone stone, rattling. Something sharp and bursting yet as I sit up, it retreats. I brush off sleep quicker, sit up straighter, get off the mattress faster to avoid this feeling. I’m not sure where it goes once I’m up and drinking the coffee my boyfriend lovingly prepared for me, but it’s just gone. Until the next morning when it rises again, only to dissipate into the ether so quickly.
Some things in life you can’t predict. Others are more obvious. Yet others still you have to muffle to avoid hearing fully, like I do with the pain in my chest. I let it slide gently past, I make my assumptions (I’ve gotten Covid-19 last March prior to the vaccines becoming available and sleep with the fan on - so it’s gotta be one of those, and if it’s not? I don’t have health insurance, doesn’t matter) and I do what I can to shut it out. Shut it out as a physical sensation in my body, and also shut it out as a thought. I simply adjust quickly and forget. By the time I’m drinking coffee it’s all, “Bricks falling and breaking and grazing my heart, who? What’s going on on Twitter, anyway? How do I feel about my morning?”
Then I type some things into the keyboard and try to stop typing and fail until it’s time to go to work. The bricks at this point have solidified and floated up into my head and all I can do is think and say, “I’m so tired” until the very moment I get home and go to bed, and in the morning I wake up and they’re in my ribcage yet again, broken. The gravity of it.
Everyone who loves me needs to wear a safety vest. I might catapult backwards and if you’re much too much attached, take you with me. You need something bright so that the obedear seaman can come find you once are without me and adrift at sea, empty at the brim.
I’m always full. My bricks and bubbles keep me company.