Fall

A rather unhealthy habit of not having the motivation to eat. Though eating in itself is nothing special here. I don't have the motivation for a lot of things. Not so much the food as the effort of rising, out of my bed, out of my room, out of the building, down the streets.

Today I was in a line at the checkout. My fridge has already been empty for days, I hadn't eaten in even longer, so ironically - though not at all surprisingly - this was where it happened. No one was moving. There were labels on everything. My eyelid started fluttering again. I jammed a thumb against it and swerved off to the (smaller line at the) self-checkout machines. For once, I made it through to the very end, almost had paid, before the screen spat out an error message. 'Unexpected item'. All the rest.

By this point I was almost paralysed. Rigid. Though not unmoving - I swayed almost. My eyelid started fluttering again - or maybe I just noticed it once more. Every time it happened there was a little pocket of my vision that dipped in and out of existence, warping into a sort of blurred brightness, where things moved from place in the way a jigsaw piece is plucked out. The machine kept calling out for an attendant. No one was coming to help. I stood there for 15 seconds or what might have amounted to something closer to twenty million hours, watching myself watching my vision shimmer, the bright eventually replacing itself with dark, a rippling curving nothing like volutes crawling over my eyes, almost like ink, even, though struck through with red and maybe even yellow.

My legs gave in then and I crumpled. I wasn't unconscious, or if I was, not for very long. People finally crowding around. Though not exactly helping. I think the machine was still calling for assistance by the time I got up, but at that point I just swept the rest of the food into my bag and left. No one stopped me.