After Hours
Something happened yesterday that scared me realllll bad. I’ve sat through Hereditary and The Conjuring, but nothing has ever made me sweat like this.
I was on the 6, coming home from my usual trip uptown, where I go to think and scream and write alone by the river. Yesterday, maybe, I thought a little too much. When I stepped onto the train, my vision was a little worse than normal. I felt queasier than usual, and the ringing in my ears was louder than its normal hum.
“Huh,” I thought. “Must not have drunk enough water before I left the house.” If dehydration was the culprit, that motherfucker was laced with stress and panic in lethal doses.
A few stops in, the blur in my vision turned into TV static. “After Hours” by The Weeknd faded into the background like both my ears were underwater, even though I knew my AirPods were in. I touched them anyway to make sure I hadn’t lost one. I was wobbling. I was nauseous. The last few times this happened, I was deadlifting almost twice my body weight, or swimming 8x400 IMs at practice on four hours of sleep. This time, I was just trying to stand on a crowded subway and get home to eat dinner.
As the grey closed in on my eyes and ears, I lost track of where my body was and where my hands were on the handrail. I had to claw at consciousness while every other sensation fought to crowd it out. Every blink was laborious, a struggle to make an image out of the pixelated static swallowing me. Every breath was shallow but intentional, so I wouldn’t accidentally throw up on the person in front of me. A rush of heat burned through the back of my neck and skull like lava: my body’s revenge for my blasphemous act of trying to stay awake.
Right before I went fully blind, I mustered the last ounce of energy I had to tap the poor Indian guy sitting in front of me. He was wearing what I think was a green crewneck and a grey messenger bag. By the time my finger touched his arm, I could tell he was already watching me.
“Sorry,” I said meekly, like a dog begging for scraps. I didn’t even know if my eyes were open or closed. “Do you mind if I sit down? I feel like I’m passing out.”
That mf moved out of the way at the speed of light.
Blind, deaf, and semi-vegetative, I guided my butt, with some help from gravity, toward an approximation of the open seat. Luckily, before my arms gave out on the handrail keeping me upright, I landed on a plastic seat instead of a stranger. Thank god. I couldn’t see at all now. Everywhere I looked was black-and-white sparks, no matter how hard I tried to make out the station signs or the kind stranger who’d given me his seat. Another wave of heat rushed up the back of my head. My arms went slack, and my phone dropped to the floor. Instead of the familiar rumble of the train, a head-splitting ringing now filled my ears. My body was at war with me, and I hadn’t done a damn thing to start it.
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Only one thought filled my mind, which is how I knew I was STILL conscious: “Don’t throw up… please don’t throw up.”
“It’d be so fucking embarrassing if you threw up on the subway. There are so many people here watching you… Whatever you do, don’t throw up…”
I hung on by a single thread of my fear of public humiliation, and maybe one heroic vessel of blood that had made it up to my brain by skipping delivery to my muscles, my eyes, my vagus nerve, and my ears. I closed my eyes to dull the grey static, and somehow plucked out my AirPods, still playing god-knows-what. My phone magically reappeared on my lap; I don’t know whether that was my own doing or the work of a good Samaritan beside me. And I just breathed. Manual breathing was all I could manage to think about. I was more scared of collapsing on the guy next to me than of dying, should I stop.
A breeze of cool air hit my forehead, sweet relief against the heat that had tormented me moments before. I reached up to feel it in my hair, but my fingers came back wet with sweat. There was no breeze. The doors hadn’t opened once since I sat down.
Slowly, the ringing turned back into coherent words like “42nd Street” and “Please exit from the doors on your right.” I didn’t dare open my eyes, afraid the blood finally returning to my brain would get stolen again by unnecessary organs like my eyes. I just sat and breathed, slow and deep, and fought off wave after wave of nausea. Soon I could feel the train jostle beneath me again, and sense sensation in my hands, which were in my lap, holding tight to my AirPods. The announcer called out two more stops until I’d have to face the insurmountable challenge of standing up and getting off the subway.
Against all odds, I made it to the 14th Street station with all my electronics, my water bottle, AND my wallet. Fuck yeah.
I hobbled along the walls of the station, afraid that if I went any faster my legs would give out, and more afraid that the horrible TV static would take over my vision again. Every breath was still manual in the stuffy air, where voices, music, and passing trains did nothing for my gastrointestinal stress. On the stairs, people kept glancing back as they passed me, leaning on the handrail and crawling one step at a time toward the grey sky.
Eventually I reached the last stair and met flat ground again, where I was blessed with a real, cool breeze and rain. I sat my ass down on the brick road on Union Square West and tasted it. After dodging every close encounter with syncope on my Odyssean voyage, the last thing I cared about was strangers looking at me funny.
The rain tasted good. Better than the picture I made: a random Asian girl, legs splayed in front of her, propped on her elbows on the ground, tongue out to the sky. Better than the temptation of Ubering home instead of trekking the last 15 minutes to my apartment because the L was down.
Who do I even tell about this? Who do I even call? My therapist? My mom? The guy I’m talking to?
I don’t know… so here you go, Medium.
