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Invincible

Michael Trainor

    Stomach acid like old orange juice. This is the part I hate: when there’s nothing left inside your stomach to spew, so puddle after putrid puddle of enzymes and bile come heaving out of your stomach instead of food. Six days sick and I’m praying to God and the devil – promising my soul to the first one who can cure this sick, nauseous feeling inside my gut or bring on the sweet, welcome relief of unconsciousness or death.
    Which is worse? Death or dying? At least when you’re dead it’s over. Dying, you feel like you just swallowed a gut full of hypodermic needles filled to the brim with expired Sunny Delight, poking millions of tiny little holes in your abdomen before injecting that vile liquid into your body so fast that all at once the fluids come rushing out of your mouth at speeds that could make Superman go back in time.
    Dying isn’t fun. I should know, I’ve done it before.
    You’re feverish. You’re so hot but you’re shaking. You’re burning up but you still feel cold. This is the body’s natural way of fighting off infection. Beads of sweat from your forehead drip down your eyebrows, roll down your eyelids and obscure your vision — like a hot summer day or a night of passionate love-making, but instead you’re in your bedroom alone in the middle of January, wondering if sweat can permanently affect your vision. You’re cold, clammy, and wet. Your eyes start to forget the difference between the burn of sweat and tears. Your body, fighting to stay alive, crying from every pore of your skin as you tremble and shake in the night.
    Your mind goes fuzzy and you dream while you’re awake. Remembering not-so-distant memories of a time when you weren’t crouched in the fetal position on the floor of your studio apartment with a pool of stomach enzymes between you and your bed.
    You remember seeing him for the first time, behind the register, from two customers back in the checkout line at Old Navy. Those smoldering eyes, that broad chest, the way he popped his hip to the side and tapped his fingers on the counter while he waited for the cash register to respond. You remember praying that the other check-out girl didn’t finish her next sale before this beautiful specimen finished his, ensuring your chance to meet the man of your dreams.
    You remember hoping he wouldn’t think you were cheap for buying every item from the clearance rack, and even consider stepping out of line to buy a more expensive pair of jeans. But you don’t because you’re too afraid to lose your place in line.
    You remember hoping he’d like your taste in clothes; hoping he could picture what those discount jeans would look like around your waist or on the floor beside his bed. And as the specimen finished his sale, you silently thanked God for the possibility of finding out.
    One person back in the line at Old Navy, with your chance encounter ensured, you snap back to reality as another wave of nothing spews from inside your stomach onto the floor. Cold, tired, and on the brink of passing out, you wonder if you’ll wake up this time. Hugging your abdomen with both arms, you imagine what it felt like when the man of your dreams first wrapped his arms tight around your waist, holding you close as you slowly drifted off to sleep. You remember that first night, that freeing feeling of doing exactly what you wanted to do, of being exactly who you wanted to be for the first time in your entire life. In the arms of this loving stranger, you remember what it felt like to be alive. To be invincible.
    Violent rage rips open your insides and you remember what it felt like the night your wife returned from the doctor’s office with tears in her eyes and beat a confession out of you. Clenching the test results in her fist she demands to know how you could do this to her. You remember the pain she inflicted by throwing around accusations that hurt more than her fists. Crying, she punches you in the face as hard as she can. Screaming, she calls you names like: Bastard, Asshole, and Faggot; each name inflicting as much damage to your soul as every jab she lands inflicts on your body. A one-two combination of insults and injuries flying at you and you let her whale away on your body and mind because you know you deserve it.
    You remember the heartache of going to the doctor to confirm what you already know. The painful realization that the rest of your life won’t be anything like you planned. You remember calling the man of your dreams crying, asking how he could do this to you, calling him a liar when he says he doesn’t know what you’re talking about, and hanging up before saying goodbye.
    You slip into sadness and spend the next four years alone; each day becoming increasingly more like this one, lying on your floor waiting for a death that never comes. At your lowest, when you feel like both God and Death have abandoned you, a phone call rips through the silence of your studio apartment, and you half-expect it to be God or Satan on the other end beckoning you home.
    You answer the phone and the woman on the other end, barely recognizable with her meek and weary voice, from some distant life you can scarcely recall, says she’s sorry for everything. Close to the end, with regret in her heart, she says she’s made a lot of bad choices in her life, the least of all was you. She tells you about a man, not unlike the man of your dreams, who she met at a 24-hour coffee bar one night after law school. She says how she and the man would meet for coffee every Tuesday night from then on and talk about all the things that never seemed to interest you. She confesses how after a few weeks “coffee next to school” became “drinks downtown” and how she thought they might even be falling in love. She tells how after one night of drinks, while walking to the corner to meet a cab, she decided she wanted to spend the night with him; the man she loved too much to think he could ever do anything to hurt her. The man too perfect and charming to be sick. The man who turned out to be her killer. Yours too.
    With tears in her voice, and a final goodbye, the line goes dead as you begin to cry. Your legs go weak and that familiar feeling of having to spew on an empty stomach begins to form in the back of your throat. Nauseated, you curl up in the fetal position beside you bed and wait for the sickness you hope will be your last. Your thoughts return to a beautiful man, who you’ll never see again. A man who, as it turns out, never did anything to you but make you feel invincible for one perfect night: the last night you ever felt alive.

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