Crisis

 

My skin feels like the sound of an engine cooling once parked, a clicking both metallic and electrical deep in my skin, and I desperately try to think of what I forgot to take. I can hear, I can almost hear each clink as my nervous system spasms but my muscles stay still. In laxity they are restless; there’s an itch to move never satisfied. I’m unsettled. The feeling is unsettling. A house may be haunted, or it may groan on its foundations from an unseen tremor or an unheard wind.

Is it dopamine? But it can’t be the A because I slept last night. I laid still in my bed, knocked out as I long to be, the stillness I’m loath to give up, even as I see the harm the drug is doing me. I didn’t thrash last night, angry and confused at my wakefulness. My back didn’t pop as I threw myself onto my other side, again; I didn’t feel my eyes frictioned down into my skull, that sensation of wearing down akin to the second half of exams week when the face is permanently flushed (not niacin-flushed or exercise-flushed but hot-flushed) and caffeine stops working. Or, it works, you’re awake, you can’t sleep, but neither can you think and neither can the mind stop racing. It’s not the dopamine.

Is it norepinephrine? It can’t be B, I’m not shitting myself half to death. I don’t know if I notice any symptoms other than that when I miss a dose, and I’ve never missed two. Is that what this is? But I took my B this morning, I know I did. The plastic smell is still flowing up the back of my throat to my nose. That was this morning, the rattle of the little BBs inside the capsule, the sticky sound as the two capsules—one blue-and-white and one orange-and-green—touch in my damp and open palm. I’m sure I took them this morning. I’m sure of it.

Is it serotonin? It can’t be serotonin, because if I took the B, I took the C, too. Did I? I must have. What even would that feel like? Have I ever forgotten it to know?

It occurs to me to wonder if I’m having another attack, if this is an acute episode, another crisis. It occurs to me to wonder if I’d even know. The difference between crisis and stasis is, mentally, a matter of degrees.

Do I shake my hand for release, or does my hand shake to release? If it’s another crisis, then I have to call the hospital, so it can’t be another crisis. I sit on the floor and breathe through my nose and try not to twitch and try to think of what this could be if not a crisis.

Is it the dopamine?