I wake, panicked, from sleep I didn’t see sneaking up on me.  I am hot, my sweaty body clings to my childhood blanket, twisting me deeper than my tested patience can cope with.  A short struggle leaves me decisively the loser as my heart beat rises along with my discomfort.  There is a distinct feeling of panic.  The feeling is not mine, it exists in the room.  In the dressing that lie beside my bed, in the drugs in my jacket pocket, in the enema kit that I love and hate at the same time.

I struggle to get up.  I don’t really know what is going on.  The need to rise is not logical.  It wells from deep in my subconscious.  I know I am dying, I need to move, to search, to find the source of the problem and eliminate it.  I don’t have time to sleep, to nap, rest.  I must move and keep moving.  So I get up, panicked and confused.  Hot and uncomfortable.

I stumble, twisted in the blanket.  As I slow down I start to take stock.  I am in pain.  This is not a new thing.  My leg hurts.  This is not a new thing.  Most of all the feeling of discomfort covers everything like a blanket of ash.  I do not know where it comes from.  If I were to separate myself from life I would be clinical.  It would exist not in reality but in numbers and probabilities.  35% from pain killer addiction.  30% from radiation.  35% from tumours, 5% from impossible hope.  And such it would stay. But it is here, I can not step outside my body and take up another.  I can only be me.   And I am cold, clamy, twisted in blanket, barely awake, with a sore leg and a feeling of discomfort that can not be outrun, only hidden from.  As each hiding spot crumbles to dust a new one appears.  But each time it is smaller and less secure than the last.

So what does one do.  I go downstairs, watch a documentary about large jellyfish taking over the fishing grounds of the world and take pain killers.  Slowly the feeling goes and I am left, as I always am, with the insight that you never feel better than when you have recently been in pain.  Reality floats before my eyes.  Gently undulating in the currents of my subconscious emotions.  I question what is real anyway.  I am still, silent.  I look again and I am not there.  Just another life in a sea of trillions to be lost and forgotten in the mists of time.  Only my discomfort comes with me, waiting behind the shimmering surface of capsules made by machines made by men.