general every little thing she does is tragic

Posted November 27, 2005 • Comments Off on every little thing she does is tragic

I know I haven’t scanned those last two crossword puzzles yet.

I go back to work tomorrow, at the same place, and am scheduled to work all week. This is great because I’ll earn more than half my January rent this week if I get at least 32 hours, but it’s killing me inside. Maybe it’s just because I took a week off to go home for Thanksgiving, or maybe it’s because my sleeping is still completely out of whack from staying up all night to catch my flight home, but I can’t bear to think about getting up tomorrow morning.

Whenever I think about it, I get this very real, very physical sinking feeling in my heart. Like everything in my chest just slowly dropped about half an inch. I can feel this tangible dread, and it’s all I can do not to cry out.

Once again last night (as happened most recently Tuesday night, and as has happened several times for the last two months) I woke up around 5 am with really bad abdominal pain. It feels like bloating, like it would be easily relieved by going to the bathroom, but that doesn’t fix it. Today it did a new thing, which was it spent the rest of the morning higher up, in an area I think of as “stomach” rather than “abdomen.”

Lisa’s pretty well convinced I have an ulcer, and honestly I think she may be right. I tear myself apart with worry, I take overlarge doses of Aleve almost every day, I tend to drink caffeinated soda on an empty stomach … all the things that are supposed to rip holes in you.

I just don’t understand why, if that’s what it is, it doesn’t hurt all the time. Maybe it hurts at 5 am because that’s when my stomach becomes empty after digesting everything I ate that day. Maybe if I tried to eat crackers or bread or something right before I go to sleep, that’d help. I just don’t know.

Meanwhile, the worrying never stops. It just gets worse. I had a nice break from it while I was home, but it started back up yesterday as soon as I was conscious again.

The worrying never stops. It’s so cold here, and what if one of these months I can’t pay for the heat? It’s almost Christmas, and what if I can’t buy even a few little presents for everyone I love? I wake up, and I’m scared. I go to bed, and I’m scared.

I spend the days with my work and the rest of my life secondary concerns. My primary activity is counting dollars and cents in my head, trying to figure out if and when I’m going to run out of money. I put gas in the car, even at a dollar a gallon less than I paid a month ago, and wonder if I can get by on half a tank this week. I cringe at the frequent realization that it costs me $8.65 and almost three hours to do my round-trip commute to DC. That’s every day. A five-day week costs $43.25. More than two hours of my pay, after taxes, just for the privilege of spending fifteen hours on buses and trains.

I’m only thirty-two years old, and I’m not a mother. Nothing in my life should yet give me cause to worry so much it physically hurts me. I wish I could just stop it.