Dear Digital Diary

Dear Digital Diary,

I’ve had an incurable stomachache for months.

Every time I think I’ve gotten better, I’m not. Everything makes me nauseous. Things that shouldn’t be nausea-inducing. The Zofran I was prescribed hasn’t helped.

It might just be that it’s incurable. It’s not a virus that made me sick. It’s closer to a disease that worms its way into the very cells of my body, so microscopic that it’s just simply a part of me now. I can do a full workout, clock in and out of my full-time job, go to a concert, hang out with my friends, but when it’s the end of the day and I’m laying awake, my stomach churns.

Music makes me sick. The songs I used to love now cause my forehead to break out in a sweat and I must roll the windows down in my car to keep it all in. Bob Dylan sings it best. He writes about sickness but makes it sound beautiful. Beautiful like it’s dead, like the beauty in something haunting. One chord and my stomach twists.

Sometimes I’ll see someone’s face, and my body acts as though I’m being held at gunpoint. I freeze in these moments, and it’s the aftershock that causes the sick belly and rising bile. I’ve found that when you lose someone, they start to appear in everyone’s face. It’s a side effect, really — the hallucinations. It’s then that I believe I’m really ill.

My mother used to talk about this sickness that she used to have. It was when she was in her first year of college, before she met my father. She didn’t even get that close, but she caught it anyway. It was terrible. It seemed like a cold. A bug. But she still talks about it, and I wonder if she ever truly healed. Hence the disease.

Perhaps it carries. Maybe I, not even conscious yet, was already predisposed to be that much more at risk to catch it.

I should’ve tried harder to prevent it. I thought I had, but I simply got too close. And here I remain. I’ve tried the therapist, and journaling, writing and painting, tarot and vitamins, sunshine and the sea. The dull ache remains.

And while the days draw into weeks that become months, I wonder if I will ever get over it. I told myself that I would, but I’m starting to believe that some things are not things that you get over, but that after a while, it simply lays dormant until inconvenient.