Casey G

I feel sick and it is nothing, my stomach is settled, my heart appropriately faint. I compress and pulsate anyway, just to stimulate something. There is nothing, it is nothing. I look at the mirror in hopes that I am bleeding from my eye sockets, praying that blood will be pouring from some orifice that doesn’t make sense and might make someone feel queasy while occurring. There is no blood, just my face on a slab of glass. I consider, for a moment, smashing my closed fist over the glass like it might do something. I am not motivated to do this, my fist doesn’t even twitch. It’s just a consideration – I merely consider the perception of my face splintered into a thousand uneven shards. It would be something at least.

I am instead left with the ominous nothing, the notion that something bothersome is about without the ability to identify it. It festers and quiets, announces itself in fleeting spurts of agony before lying dormant for indiscernible periods. I can do nothing but proceed, and so I go to work, I fill my gas tank, buy my groceries, pay rent. I see my friends, go to concerts, drink coffee. I try to sleep, tossing and turning until an alarm jolts me from the purgatory realm. I feel it lurking, begging me to inquire further. Begging me to tear my insides out in desperate search of a phantom pain, this sense of doom that houses within. Instead, I get dressed. I go outside.

Most days, I pass a coffee shop on the walk to my car. The patrons are perched as eager voyeurs in the seating along the glass window. I am the fish to their bowl, they are the petulant children at the zoo to my caged animal, observing with awe and the privacy of containment as the creature exists abnormally within a manufactured reality. Today, two women walk out of the front door as I walk perpendicular to it. With their coffees in tow, one giddily exclaims about the quality of the coffee and the aesthetic of the shop, “I told you this place has the best coffee!”

It’s just funny, because they definitely don’t have the best coffee. I acknowledge the subjectivity of such a claim, as she’s surely allowed to believe it to be the best and proclaim so, but she’s just so dead wrong. The coffee is mediocre, seemingly repeatable with instant coffee mix. The syrups are peculiar and have after-tastes that contradict from the intended flavors. The food is better than the coffee, but the decor is what lures and maintains the crowd. Her comment had me wondering how she could be calibrated so differently. Do people just say things sometimes, or did she really mean that? The best, is quite the accolade. I don’t know that I’ve ever called something the best. But maybe she meant it, I have no real cause to prove she didn’t.

I get to the car and reach for the tin in my purse, feeling the gems on my fingertips as I search without a guide. I ignite the flame, light the tip, and then I am engulfed. The sickness is suffocated by nausea, the curiosity quenched through bitter suppression.