48/90, attack

I noticed it coming on slowly. My phone was ringing less and less. I could easily get by with checking my facebook once every three days. I could reduce my cell phone bill by lowering my allotted text messages each month; I no longer reach the limit.

I'm not sure when it happened, but plans with my friends have gone from being a few hours of stress relief to a two-hour panic attack.

Today, making breakfast for a friend who was in town for the weekend, I had trouble forming sentences and keeping the words he spoke from floating away from my ears and out the window before I could process them. I excused myself and took a shower, hoping it would clear my head. It didn't.

I locked myself in my room to "knock some things out" before lunch with a friend. I moved lunch to dinner. I asked if she'd rather just order a pizza. I thought the extra few hours would clear my head. They didn't.

My friend arrived, bearing an enormous dinner salad, loaf of banana bread still warm from the oven and Dude, a Brittany spaniel with a melodramatic flop to his ears. This cleared my head a bit, as we talked about books we're reading and feminist fights we're having with women who have everything given to them and therefore don't understand what the real world is like.

I calmed down a second, while I drained the glass of Reisling. Before the sweet on the wine glass had dried, my chest was contracting. I was itching to return to my computer. She understood. We planned a homework party. I thanked her for forgiving me, and I knew that she understood. (We have a system–make plans, break them, make plans, change them, get to stressed, move them, see each other for a few hours a month. We're working on correcting it, which is hard to do when I can't seem to get her to move to France with me. I'm still trying.)

Locking myself back into my room, I know these hours aren't helping. I'm not really progressing, because I never let myself get ahead. A friend said today that people need more hobbies. They need something to do in their time, a fun thing to just do to remember that we're living our own lives. I realized that my hobby is finding the next assignment and "knocking it out."

Maybe, instead of knocking these assignments out of the ballpark, I need to take myself off of the line-up for a while. Slack off on school. Make sure I pass and let the rest slide off my back. Why doesn't this sound relaxing, reassuring or more flexible?

My fingers hurt as I type. I've run out of comfortable ways to hold my neck or arms or spine to sit in front of this laptop and keep myself going. There are 22 minutes of battery life left and I'm feeling the same red emergency reserve firing up in my own battery. It's that usual time of night–when I realize that I'm not a night owl. I won't stay up until 2 a.m. to finish things up and sleep in until 9 a.m. I won't even sleep until 7 a.m. without a start and a jump from the bed–I've missed something.

My eyes are hurting, pulling in and then unfocusing, leaving a bit of my brain feeling floaty and unattached. It's been happening this way throughout the week: my eyes suddenly letting go and giving me a slight motion sickness as I look at the projection screens in class. I keep telling myself I need my eyes checked. I need to close them more. I need to stop typing more.

Then I remember those rectangular purple frames that I tried on and how angular my chin seemed, how arched and high my cheekbones felt, how much more literary I seemed to myself. Perhaps this is why my eyes seem swimmy. They're telling me to go ahead–to fudge the test and get the frames and be convinced that I needed them, that I'm grounded and focused now.

I still can't be sure, so for now I'll shut my eyes, breathe and dream about yoga instead of actually doing it. At least the mat's out and ready to go for a fresh, more inspired Sunday.