“I’m not dying,” I say finally, a feeble attempt at a joke. “I’m just having a bad week.”
“You sure about that?”
I look up at him.
He doesn’t press again. Doesn’t soften. Just meets my gaze steadily. Like he’s leaving the door open, but he’s not going to push me through it.
“Thanks,” I murmur.
He nods. Then, quietly: “You let me know if that week gets worse. Text me. Maybe I can help somehow.”
And then he’s gone. The quiet rushes back in too fast. Too loud.
Leaving me alone, with my cooling tea, the pounding in my head, and the terrifying sense that something is coming – and I have no idea how to stop it.
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EIGHTEEN
LANI
By all rights,today should feel like relief.
Five double shifts in a row after having so much time off will do that to anyone – dragging myself out of bed before sunrise, feet aching by mid-morning, smiling through customers and noise and steam and heat until everything blurs together. I’ve been counting down to this day off like it’s a finish line. One full day where no one needs anything from me. No alarms. No apron. No pretending I’m not running on fumes.
So I don’t understand why I feel worse.
I wake late, tangled in sheets that smell faintly of clean laundry and something else I still can’t place, my body heavy and wrong. Not the good kind of heavy – the earned exhaustion after hard work – but the kind that pins you down from the inside. My limbs feel thick. Weighted. Like gravity’s been turned up just for me.
I lie there for a while, staring at the ceiling, waiting for it to pass.
It doesn’t.
When I finally sit up, the room tilts. Not enough to send me back down, but enough to make my stomach clench. I breathe through it, slow and careful, like I’m talking myself down from something skittish and unpredictable.
You’re just tired, I tell myself. Five doubles.Of course you’re tired.
Except I slept. Properly slept. No alarms, no interruptions. And still my skin feels tight, oversensitive, like every nerve ending is humming just below the surface. There’s a heat sitting under my ribs that doesn’t belong there, spreading slowly, insistently, as if my body’s forgotten how to regulate itself.
I swing my legs out of bed and stand.
Another wave of dizziness rolls through me – stronger this time. I grab the dresser, knuckles whitening as I wait it out. My heart is racing, but not in panic. More like anticipation.
That thought makes my stomach drop.
“Nope,” I mutter aloud. “Absolutely not.”
I force myself through the motions of the morning. Shower. Clean clothes. Toast I barely manage to swallow. Tea that tastes wrong, too sharp on my tongue. I keep expecting the fog to lift, for my body to catch up with the rest I’ve finally given it.
It doesn’t.
By mid-morning, I’m curled on the sofa with a blanket pulled tight around me, scrolling mindlessly on my phone just to give my hands something to do. Every few minutes, a shiver ripples through me despite the warmth. My head throbs faintly, not quite a headache, more like pressure building behind my eyes.
I consider calling a doctor.
The thought barely forms before anxiety clamps down hard in my chest.