He had told himself a while back that this problem would resolve itself. That was at least eight years ago. It hadn't. He knew that it was eight years and not five or six or seven years, because that was the year he had found a gray hair and solemnly extracted it from it's hold out above his right eye the way old ladies pull out weeds. That was also the same year his white ford sedan got totaled on the interstate, and the year his older sister graduated from law school. His mom had died that year. His dad had been dead for fifteen. It was the year he moved into his first real apartment and the year he finally found a job, acquired a taste for whiskey, and learned how to play poker. It was the year he had turned twenty-four. He was thirty-two now. Or at least he should be.
He had never been a fan of time. Calculating it. Pondering it. When he was younger, much younger--he was blond at this point, he remembered because he liked to stare at the sun through his hair and it would glint as though passing through dandelion puff balls--he suffered from the shakes. The shakes were what his mom called his hypoglycemic episodes. It was something that he would eventually grow out of when he was done growing, but at that time, any day was the perfect day to progress through the shakes. First he was hungry, but sometimes he wouldn't notice at all until he was also banging his fists on the wooden door of his older's sister's room or holding himself tightly as he rolled on his bed, banging his head every so often against the bedside table his dad had made before he was born and which got put in his room because his mom couldn't bare to keep it in the living room but he couldn't bare to see her throw away something of his father's.
Usually at this point, the banging noise emanating from his room would sound off an alarm, and his mother would be rushing up the stairs with a glass of orange juice to extinguish the shakes. Sometimes, though, no one heard him. And alone in his room the shakes would progress to the literal shakes. His heart rate would vibrate in his chest like steam off a tea kettle. He forgot the feeling of his wrists and the backs of his legs on his blue flannel sheets. Vision almost failed, not sure of what to look at, not sure anymore on how to focus. The poster above his dresser, a magic eye that was supposed to turn into a crescent moon, would instead only evaporate.
It wasn't just a physical attribute, though. If that was all that it was, the rocking and the yelling, it would have been a funny quirk. An interesting, though easily fixed, pathology. It wouldn't be as terrifying as he still remembers it. The Shakes. Not the shakes.
No one thought could stay in focus for very long when he was in the final stages of the shakes. But while it was there, he examined the thought from every angle. Rarely did he remember what he had thought about during these times, but he knew that they were very smart things to be thinking. Occasionally he would get out of the shakes feeling energized. Usually the shakes left him in a morbid mood that he wouldn't be able to shake for the rest of the day.
He still remembers playing in a blow up pool outside his house at midday when the shakes descended like an unapologetic, apocalyptic god. He tried very hard, squeezing the sides of the pool with his skinny white arms, to lift himself out and onto the grass where he could army crawl to the porch and maybe to the back door, where he might get his mother's attention through the screen door. But he kept sliding back down, trapped in a polyethylene bubble filled up with summer shimmering blue water and a panicked child with a sunburn forming on the tip of his nose and dilated pupils pushing the hazel out of his eyes.
In the unknown moments he spent sitting upright, he came to a conclusion to nothing in particular: Time was always happening but nobody knew what it meant and he'd been alive for times that he didn't remember and the pictures in his house of him he had no idea that was who he was but it looked like him but it couldn't have been him and there was a time when he had known his father but then his father had died and he no longer existed but his memories of him still did and if he was going to die like his father had maybe it would be best to die now and not add to the confusion of tricking people into thinking you're alive when you're really dead or be alive when you should be dead or why does it take forever to die anyway? why do you have to live an entire life before it's over. what if it were to die now. what would happen then? i don't want to die i don't want to die but that's all there is there will be one day when i'm dead and then there will be more time but i won't really be a part of it i'll just be in memories but i'll be dead and what is being dead? like sleeping only not because you won't dream? and there could be a heaven but no, unlikey. mom says that when you die they bury you. dad may be in heaven but he's probably just dead. why?
Eventually he was saved from the pool, his mom had gotten soaked when she had pulled him out and almost choked him trying to pour the orange juice down his non-compliant throat. But he never got over that thought.
One day, when he was twenty-four, he lost the ability to hide from that thought. Now he was clinically depressed, and he had been given something for it. But he stopped refilling his prescriptions after a while. He didn't think it was worth the $25 a month to take something that made you feel better but couldn't make you forget what had made you feel bad in the first place.
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