"I'm dying", she said flatly.
As if speaking it aloud would somehow point out the ridiculousness of the statement and they would both have a good laugh at it. She smirked ever so slightly, to get the ball rolling, but inside her she couldn't take the smirk seriously and her eyes darted around the room, finally settling on her hands as they fidgeted in her lap.
Her left hand pulled at the muscles of her right thumb, massaging them even though they weren't particularly tense. Everything else was tense, but she massaged her palm because it was least noticeable, or at least, that's what she told herself. She had no idea what anyone else thought, which was half of her problem. Maybe more than half. Maybe that was the whole problem.
"You don't believe me," she said. "That's okay. I'm not sure I believe it myself."
And for a moment, she didn't.
"I don't have any evidence, but that's because I'm afraid to gather any. The signs are there -- chest pains. At any moment my heart could just stop."
The doctor scrunched up his eyes. She wasn't sure exactly what that meant, but she guessed there was a component of concern mixed with an analytic process of intuiting what was going on inside her that would cause her to feel that way. Which reinforced the idea that the doctor didn't believe she was actually dying. Concerned anyway, that's how the doctor was. Or concerned all the more that she would be contemplating her own death as a symptom of whatever it was that was really going on.
That's how it worked. Nothing was really the way it seemed. But not in the sense that her sense of impending doom was mere window dressing on something likely to be ordinary stress-induced anxiety or whatever it was they're calling nervous breakdowns nowadays. No, the doom was real in its own way, but it was also a manifestation of feelings that don't have distinct definitions. They can't be described like colors or smells, even when sometimes they can be described with colors and smells.
This particular monstrous feeling might be described by someone else as stinking blackness. Except for her, it didn't stink, so much as the fragrance was so familiar one became accustomed to it and ceased to notice anymore. The blackness could only refer to the complete inability to distinguish the surface, edges, or any other features to the feeling.
Nowadays, blackness was respite from the feeling anyway. It seemed strange to her that she would hide from the fear of death by sleeping -- that is, when she could sleep. Like hiding from the tiger in the lion's den. Wouldn't someone as terrified of death as her seek out life experiences instead of seeking to be unconscious as often and for as long as possible?
Some people, afraid of death, seek out life. Others seek to become closer to death.
"It's only a matter of degrees," said the doctor.
[Found Feb. 2025, in an archive on a CD-ROM. I was, indeed, dying; and it took over 20 years of suffering and heavy medication before it was finally found and repaired.]