I.

I'm not counting the days.

A hungrier ghost of my reflection has been eating the remnants of the fatigue building up on the sides of my shoulders. My mom had started taking my advise on trying heating pads for her ache. She said it had worked. 

It's a lie to say this ennui hasn't been devouring me. But it hadn't been like this. The first few days, I felt like myself. I could read. I could sleep. I could eat in the morning in peace. I could be with my family, playing board-games, gritting my teeth when I lied to them I'd learn to play chess. During those first few days, I had wondered what made life unlike those days, what made life so unbearably inhumane in the first place, what made life needed a global crisis for it to be of a rest, a walk, not a sprint with bruised knuckles and knotted stomach. For most days before all of this, life made me stop the muscles of my insight. It was a run run run run run. These days, I can feel the hunger, the emptiness, the feeling of digesting something, and craving another. These days, I can eat. 

II.

One of the things I haven't been able to come through, sleep. I still can't quite sleep. Instead, every night, I lie down with paralyzed fear and dreaming limbs. The restlessness tells me, now that I have no classes to attend, no clothes to get into, no cold water in dawns, it has been my fault. It's my fault. 

It has been years in the work, but I traced it back whenever I didn't have a company, be it one of my younger sisters or a task to finish, that it's one of these or all of: the lack of exercise, the confusing childhood, the traumatizing school years, the sub-clinical depression, the iron deficiency, the myopic eyes, the loneliness, the unrequited loves, the vertigo.

On one of these days, I had vertigo upon waking up. I carried on: showered, walked the stairs, drank Yakult, watched TV. It didn't wane. I fumbled the pill and forced my throat to have it. 

By afternoon, someone asked me how I was doing. It had always been a thing people say to each other instead of anything else, but that day I had something to say: I had vertigo. I waited. They said sorry, is it going better, are you feeling okay? Is it still about the vertigo, I asked myself. Still, I texted back: I'm fine. I had the medicine. I always have the medicine. 

III.

Also on one of these days, someone texted me. It was a long one. There were paragraphs. For the first time, when I asked whether they were okay, they waited. When I began to talk about what I had been doing, they finally said: I'm not okay. I felt a sweat seizing from under the sheets, and I sat up straight. Words. Words words words. What word? All I knew, it was not an invitation to say that I'm not okay, too.

I had been thinking of writing this, because when it was said they said not to tell anyone. Of course, I winced. I barely have the energy to tell people about me. Not even your mom. Our mothers are friends. We have the same birthday and date. Before they had said anything, what first arose was: sorry I couldn't tell you a happy birthday back then. I laugh-texted: I didn't, either, so we're even. I wondered whether I even remembered my birthday when it happened. I didn't say it. Instead I said, thank you. I made a long closure just to match their anxiety, to make sure I was listening and returning back the vomit of sentences they had thrown up. Thank you. It was endless. I wish someone would've said that to me, once in a while. Just a thank you. Then I'd say, for what. 

Just a thank you. 

IV.

When I liked someone, I noticed I wanted them to know I'm always praying for them.

I delete most of my past personal texts as a habit, but I usually know when it's the time both of us knew we were either too drowsy or too sick of the inertia to continue, because I was always the one who ended the conversation: Take care. When I caught myself typing in onto the screen over and over, I stopped. It had seemed like a thing to be fixed. I'm almost there.

It's always hovering on the tip of my tongue, making my gums sour: Take care, take care, take care. When we were sitting together eating candies: yours mint, mine ginger, my chest was sore, a megaphone: Take care, take care, take care. When we were sitting in a room, alone, you cross-legged, I kept looking at my hair and slowing down my heartbeat: Take care, take care, take care. Were you guys having an important talk? I rushed to say no, and when we parted, diffusing down the desire to snatch the wrist and hug, I made myself blink: Take care, take care, take care. It was all over, spilling, and unseen. 

Now that we're not meeting and my reflex is dying, I can't catch it for myself. When I begin to say it for myself, it breaks, twists, falls, and lands wingless. These days, when I cry for no reason, I search for that voice. Where did it come from, again?

When I stopped saying take care to someone, I knew it was when I stopped hoping, when it stopped being a thing I spiritually tend to, when it stopped becoming a part of me. When I feel myself not getting enough sleep despite everything, not eating well, not taking my iron supplementation, not drinking water, not looking after the back pain, not taking the heating pads, not minding the vertigo, and not telling anyone, including myself, that I'm not okay, I wonder whether I've become a phantom, an amputation, with the tissues bloodless and the nerves yearning, eliciting chemicals for things not there. I wonder whether I've become a substitute of a greater thing, the thing I should've cared for, the thing I should've fed, the thing I should've saved. For now, for simplicity, I'll say to myself that this is grieving. 

And as far as I'm concerned, this could take a while. It's probably worth more than a while.