The Others

Every thought is a shortcut like this. I've been fantasizing for the last two hours about what I would do if I ever saw you again. But then, for some strange reason, my blood sugar went low and I can't remember you as just you, I remember you as everyone who has ever done this exact same thing to me. People are all the same, more or less. Everyone has the power to hurt you. Everyone will. You just try so hard to find the people who can make you happy about as often as they break your heart, and you've found a friend. You try so hard and then this thing happens: it's a cold panic, it's a long day, it's a little depression, it's a little mania, and now I can't help but think that I hate you. I must hate you a lot. What's wrong with me? What's wrong with you? This should have never happened. I want to erase everything I ever knew about you. I've done it before. I've done it well. But then this thing happens, and I remember every single time you ever touched me, literally, from a handshake to a hug, and it seems so insignificant in comparison to all the other people I have ever loved in my life and what are friends even for anyway? Why? I am my best friend, why can't I be my only friend? I remember that one time, years ago, you only loved her, but then why did you tell me...? This is how people....

star trek cartoons and too much insulin is like a drug

I leave the space time continuum
All my thoughts are echoes of themselves.
Nothing is real until i force myself into orthostatics.
Then i remember what time was like before there was none.



SERIOUSLY. WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS PLACE AND HOW DO I LEAVE?

Thirty Seven Fine

37. Thirty-seven, the number is so low I can hardly believe it. In fact, I should not be conscious. But here I am, unshaken and breathing calmly. I am laying down, true, in my bed. But I stand up, and I still feel steady. I gain access to my refrigerator and a soda. Additionally, there are dextrose tablets next to my bed. I feel fine again. But I never felt not fine. I felt drunk. But I had been drinking. I could have died with a little more carelessness. And yet I hadn't. How come I always feel death when my sugar is anything less than 80? Except tonight, after dinner? Maybe I should be drunk all the time. Maybe that would help keep my sugars low and my a1c below dangerous levels. Drink all the time. Health becomes a happy accident.

Commendable

....and then sometimes my diabetes just deteriorates and I have so many lows in one day it just kind of feels like I'm literally fighting to stay alive. Yes, yes, yes. I've had this disease for almost a decade now. I should be better at controlling it. But it keeps goddamn evolving. There are also outside factors that come into play. I gain ten pounds, glucose is always high. I decide to randomly exercise for about fifteen minutes, suddenly my glucose drops. I don't know how, the last insulin I had was over two hours ago. But I guess it was just waiting around in my capillaries, you know, being a dick. I'll get used to waking up with moderate lows, and then my mom will tell me that I'm going to die in my sleep and suddenly I'm waking up with highs because the fear of death makes me eat everything in my vicinity during the few minutes of consciousness I have before I pass out. Already today my blood glucose has been under 60 three times. At least three times. Actually, four. Because I woke up and it was 50 something. I. Don't. Want. To. Do. This. Anymore. When my glucose is low I feel like my life is shit and I can't breathe and I'm coerced into an obligatory panic attack. Me?! Panicking?! So uncharacteristic. And so fucking crappy.  When my glucose is high I feel like my life is shit and I am just waiting for the feeling in my feet to disappear and then I'll lose my vision and then my kids will develop metabolic syndromes and my life is shit. Seriously. This is the most annoying fucking disease ever. It's serious enough to make you fucking hate everything about yourself and the way you live. But it's not serious enough for anyone to really care too much--I don't get optimal parking spots and nobody commends me for being brave. No, yea--it's not cancer. But it's not easily manageable either.

I don't know what I want. Clearly a cure would be nice, but I'm not that naive. And maybe I like the challenge of having to know myself so well that I can predict whether a headache is from glucose, sickness, or just stress. The few moments of pure adrenaline I have before I succumb to hypoglycemia have given me some great stories. But the panic that descends afterwards? Not so nice. I don't know. Maybe I just want a break. Maybe I just want to be attached to a dialysis machine and some IVs and just be able to lie down somewhere without wondering every five minutes if I should poke myself with a needle or just wait for the headache or the feeling of despair to leave. Just a little bit of time would be nice.  I really don't want to do this anymore. I just really want to be normal. I just really want to be optimistic about my future.

Why Didn't You Tell Me?

My blood sugar is 102. Which means that I will now get off of my bed... drag myself into my kitchen... and start gorging. I am running out of food. It doesn't matter. I'll eat Cheerios I bought months ago. I always end up saving things... hoarding food items... just in case I need sugar... like I need sugar right now.

I kept a quarter of a sandwich, unwrapped, in my car, in the summer, for three entire weeks.

Diabetes has turned me into a very frightened and very cautious wild animal.

So kitchen. My blood sugar will drop. I do not know if I am using my long acting insulin properly. I haven't seen my endocrinologist in a long time. I could ask her so many better questions now that I've covered the basics in medical school. I think the only question I really want to ask at moments like this is: Why didn't you tell me I could end up this way?


So kitchen. I am hungover. It is almost eleven at night and I am hungover. I am also exhausted. I have slept nine hours in the last two days. I am also in caffeine withdrawal. I have ingested 560 mg of caffeine today. All within three hours. My head hurts but I can't drink alcohol. I want alcohol. Or at least wine. I feel like vomiting. I will vomit. I am going to vomit. But still I have to eat.

I want to drink down five sleeping pills with a tall glass of plain, filtered, great-lakes-quality water. But then I might not wake up. I go to sleep so often wondering if I'm going to wake up the next morning. Late at night sometimes, just for fun, my heart starts beating so fast that I have to listen, and it makes me know that yes, tonight could be the night. Tonight could be the night that your blood sugar drops at two in the morning and you are too tired or too drugged out to wake up. Tonight could be the night. I do not want to eat. But I do not want to die. I don't think anyone my age thinks about dying in their sleep as much as I do. This cannot be normal. Why didn't you tell me I would end up like this?

Faked/Forced Emotion

I began to cry. It's such a weird action... but then again I was low on sleep and cranked on caffeine. I had been stressed all day. Stress. How unusual for me. And so I began to cry, not for any reason in particular. Or maybe there was a reason. Maybe the reason was minute and being so close to breaking allowed that reason to overwhelm me. Capable of showing emotions as varied as a soap opera, incapable of feeling anything but sadness and neutrality. Sadly, I found something to be sad about, so I went about assuming that I'd always be alone. Not single. Being single is not something to be saddenned by. I can't allow myself to cry about something like that. No. Being alone. Isolated. truly alone. How many more nights in my life would end up like this? I cannot begin to explain how terrifying this loneliness is. I used to think that being invisible sucked. No. This is much worse. So I cried. Well, not so much cried as tossed about. A seizure almost, my legs kicking, arms grasping, body twisting and turning and keeling. But as I yelled "it doesn't make any sense. why won't it end?" under my breath under sheats, I realized there weren't any tears on my face. My voice was dulled by my constricting throat but there were no... tears. And it occured to me that I didn't have a source for my crying.
So I tested my blood sugar.
I was hypoglycemic.
NOT depressed.
Thanks diabetes.

Brain Chemistry Demands...

Sautéing in the hormones of hypoglycemia, it becomes paramount for this--something anything oh god just this one thing--to happen.

is everything teleological if you're reasoning in a circle?

There's something weird with the people here. I'm not quite sure what it is, but it's something. I'm scared and alone. Oh wait, I know what it is. It's my blood sugar. And it is very low. This explains every little thing right now in my head that isn't making perfect sense. Because usually everything is sensible or understandably close to making perfect sense. And when it doesn't, well... then you end up like me right now, not making any sense and scared out of her mind unable to move.

Or, you end up like I did, on a mattress on a bunk bed in the middle of the Central American rain forest, scrawling words on a page while your tongue felt faint and thinly spread over your mouth and under your molars, and when you finally read the words when your blood sugar, somehow, who knows, made it up to around 60 mg/dL, you were shocked to see that in your heightened fear from low glucose, epinephrine, and phosphorylation, you were able to write your last will and testament and it wasn't pretty. Some bullshit like, "God, please forgive me. If you're there. Just know, that I would do anything to make me seem more pure in your eyes. I am sorry. Don't let me die." And on those soggy, moleskin pages then, I discovered the answer to religion and humanity quickly and with mild psychosis. Nobody wants to die. This fear makes you say and believe things that you'd never say and believe. It motivates you to kill others and to lose yourself.

But eventually, you'll wake up to consciousness and feel sucrose on your tingling tongue and you'll know that you're life has been a lie--if you find the evidence. What is the evidence? It has to be words. Anything else and it's misinterpreted. It has to be full sentences, too, otherwise you're left with whatever the hell someone stronger than you thinks whatever the hell evidence you've found is. We're not all writers. I leave myself behind as often as possible so that when I'm judged or when I'm judging myself, I'll know what's going on.

Spotted Fish

Something weird happened. In my head! It happened because my blood sugar was low… but it also happened because I was a little drunk.

This combination of intoxication and hypoglycemia rarely happens, thankfully, but it has happened multiple times, once even leading to the refinement of a brilliant but ultimately doomed seduction strategy on a single individual. I cannot apologize enough for what happened that night and I'm truly sorry.

Anyway, today it happened because I went to Wendy's on my drive home, and in my haste I couldn't check my blood sugar but knew how much sugar was in my meal, and just took a shot o' insulin anyway. Unfortunately I didn't predict that my NEED for Wendy's was a byproduct of brewing hypoglycemia… Damn.

Anyway, the weird thing that happened was I got freaked out by the spot on one of my fish's tails. And it occurred to me that I was falling prey to the reason why the spot is there in the first place. In some fish, so I will assume all fish, a dot on the tail is used to simulate an eye and therefore predators become confused about where the head of the fish really is and they lose an ability to guess where to bite. For me, it was more just a vivid confusion about the body of my fish… All fish have similar body plans, but all of a sudden it seemed as if my fish was more like an eel (also, however, a type of fish). Or perhaps it had morphed into a conjoined twin. Anyway, freaked me out and my heart rate and my palatable sweats made it apparent that I was drunk and hypoglycemic. No one to seduce. Just fish to watch and be mesmerized and confused by.

my hesitant holiday air fare

So there was this one time, in winter. Flying in coach. And they make planes so small now. When I was younger, planes were huge. But I was flying alone. Going back home maybe? Holidays. I was punishing my holiday blood sugars and gotten a little liberal with my lantus, my long acting insulin. The plane began its thirty minte plunge into O'Hare and my chest began to spasm. Increase in air pressure inversely related to decrease in blood sugar. Shaking. Sweaty. So fucking sweaty. The woman next to me is overweight. I like windows, but by choosing this seat I had condemned myself to being stuck. I dared not ask her to move. I stare at the flight attendent call button. But then the huge lady next to me might be worried. I was just one little person in a sea of travellers. What was so special about me? The thirty minutes was taking forever. I'd press the orange button. A ding would go off. What if they were already strapped in? "hello. Yes. Soda. Why? Sugar. Diabetic." They'd understand, probably. But what if they didn't? It could be a huge hassle; huger than her blocking my escape, my polite attempts to free myself into the aisle and get help myself. But I couldnt blame her at this point. The seat belt sign was on. My slowly unfocusing gaze let the lights of the signs flare into my vision. I looked back outside.  Dense life. The city now. I imagined the streets, with their .... Mmmmm .... Chicago food. Ah. Popcorn and hot dogs and hamburgers. Gyros. Ah. 7-11 Slurpees and Ah. Pizza. Ah. Thin crust cut in squares. Heaven. This plane couldn't take me there fast enough. I'd shake and sweat, cramped into the, place my head into the, usually wonderful window, until I could, probably forty-five minutes from now, content myself with McDonalds. Because hey, when your blood sugar's 45, a chicken mcnugget can taste like the best slice of pizza you've ever had. Ah. The power of adrenaline on your taste buds. And everything trembling like this plane.

My Friend Without a Name

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.

Goldfish Die By

Hypoglycemia is like:

Being a fish out of water. I stare, with glazed eyes at my surroundings. Not being compulsed to move, because there's no energy there. Like the dying fish on land, that can no longer generate ATP, I am immobilized. But it dies because it lacks Oxygen to finish off its electron transport chain. I die because I lack the glucose needed at the beginning of respiration (via mitochondria with their cristae crowns, folding and folded).

I can't move. And eventually, I don't want to. Exhaustion would finish me off, the lack of compulsion because of the lack of energy to grab a soda would be the sin I die by.

HELLO! I AM A HYPOGLYCEMIC ZOMBIE CRAVING SAUSAGE EGG MCMUFFINS!!

I think I'll start posting more, since college really IS boring. So much free time... *sigh*. Anyway, I'll talk about this (and by this, I mean yesterday's) morning, since it was scary...

HELLO! I AM A HYPOGLYCEMIC ZOMBIE CRAVING SAUSAGE EGG MCMUFFINS!!

If you didn't know, I have diabetes. It is a rather fun illness, in that I get to scare people with my needles. I usually wake up in the morning a little low, meaning I need sugar, right away, or I will eventually slip into a coma, start shaking, and eventually, die. This morning, however, I woke up lower than low, and was sent stumbling out the door to find breakfast. Why I didn't simply buy a coke or a powerade from the vending machines is beyond me. I believe my blood sugar was so incredibly low, that my brain couldn't compute it, and so went about making me do things that I didn't actually want to do.

To save you from a boring account of EVERYTHING I can remember, I will simply state my morning as such: Twenty minutes after getting into my car, I arrived back at the freshmen parking lot with a sausage egg mcmuffin (why sausage? I don't even like sausage!) and a large sprite.

Honestly, I don't remember coming or going, just walking back up the hill, talking to myself (How the hell did I get a sausage egg mcmuffin?! I hate sausage egg mcmuffins! How am I still alive anyway?!), and pondering if perhaps the only reason God keeps me alive is to send me on crazy hypoglycemic quests.

HYPOGLYCEMIA

My thoughts scattered like glass from a fallen vase. Actually, that a little too artistic to describe my mind at this critical point. It was more like trying to follow a thread of consciousness to an idea, while also being bombarded with other crazy thoughts which were so removed from what I normally would think I felt as though I must be on some sort of narcotics. Not that this was a feeling I would have broken the law to get. It was sometimes god awful.

At first I didn’t realize that this state seeped the most anxiety driven, fear prone ideas. But I had heard, early on in my affliction, that normal people with medical backgrounds took insulin because low blood sugar made them more depressed, and they could get attention and sympathy from their peers. I spent a lot of time thinking about this, and it occurred to me that anxiety is an evolutionary reaction to hypoglycemia. You’re near death. In fact, you are dead if you don’t get help, since sugar, the raw material for life sustaining ATP, is gradually being taken in too quickly by your cells, leaving none left. Your muscles shake. I compare it to being slowly filled with jell-o and having all your nerves ripped out. You don’t feel pain in any rational time scheme. A deep finger prick might take twenty seconds to register in your brain as actually hurting, and after staring at your own blood rushing out of your finger, the pain finds a way to seep away.

You also can’t control your movements. You walk, stumble really, from side to side. Arms outstretched like a blind person, I have had to conjure up all of my strength to merely walk down stairs. You shake. You sweat. You lose the ability to see words. I have sat with books, inches from my face, only to see all the words disappear leaving blank pages. Words escape you, since your brain doesn’t have enough energy to use syntax in any practical manner. I have spoken English my entire life, people tell me that I occasionally sound quite eloquent, but when my blood sugar is low enough, I adopt a foreign accent, and I falter with broken sentences.

But even more than the physical horrors, are the subtle persuasions of a hypoglycemic mind. I have woken up in the middle of the night, fearing the worst about life; kidnappers, death, the unlikelihood of the atomic bomb falling on the city of Chicago, about eleven miles from my home. Some of these ideas are crazy, and with a normal mind, I could rationally displace these fears. But the lack of sugar in my body leaves my mind ragged and quick to turn to paranoia. The same adrenaline that rushes through my veins when the sugar is almost gone, that makes me shake and sweat and drives me for food, this very hormone, also makes me go crazy. I become furious and scared. It’s why I can’t think in straight lines, and it’s also why in the middle of the night my sleeping dreams turn to waking nightmares.

Right now, it wasn’t that bad. Maybe in the 60’s or 50’s. Anything below 70 made me a little shaky. Below 40 was getting serious; serious enough for me to get escorted to the nurse’s office for free orange juice and saltine crackers, or to call the paramedics. It wasn’t that bad, but I was nervous and freaking out. I stopped inside at the Barnes & Noble’s café to get a drink, knowing that getting my car out of a supernaturally busy parking lot with a plummeting level of consciousness would be a dangerous idea. The line wasn’t long, but it moved at a pace I could barely stand. Losing any sense of kinesthesia, or the social constraints of personal space, with the loss of sugar, I got too close to a short stranger as I cut slightly in front of her to pick up and examine glass bottles. I quickly scanned the label. 27 grams of sugar, 2 serving sizes. Quick math. Was it 54? Something like that. I put it down; I don’t prefer orange juice at night. I looked patiently for a normal root beer, dodging black cherry and diet. There were few left, but even so, there was no indication of how many carbs the soda had, and I couldn’t remember how sugary root beer was. And it had caffeine. I need to go to sleep early tonight, don’t I? I picked up the orange juice again. The label had pastel colors, and it looked like it was from the fifties. I didn’t want to drink it, but I didn’t have any other choice, unless I wanted some fruity jones soda combination which would really be a crap shoot.

It’s odd being picky when your life is kind of on the line. But the one thing that doesn’t fade with the other senses, is my sense of taste. Everything may disappear. Sight, hearing, touch, balance, movement... they all vanish leaving me in a cell of near nothingness. But taste and smell remained. How else would I know that what I was eating was sugary enough? Believe it or not, I have rejected food that has been kindly offered to me when I’m low. Example:

Elora: Hey, do you have any food? Any sugar? My blood sugar’s low.

Person: I have a pop-tart.

Elora: What kind?

Person: It’s strawberry. It’s right here.

Elora: Umm… thanks, but no thank you.

I held the glass bottle in my long hands and slowly rocked back and forth. On my toes, on my heels. Off my heels, off my toes. There were only four people in front of me, but everyone was moving so slowly. In my epinephrine high, my mind raced as everyone else stood virtually still. I tried to comfort myself by the knowledge that if my body gave up and I fell to the floor, all I’d need to utter is one of the following statements, “I’m diabetic”, “My blood sugar’s low”, “Hypoglycemia”, and I’d get free food. Maybe even an ambulance ride. Though those were painfully expensive.

I eyed the mural on the barnes & nobles walls, of famous authors. A few of them I had read last year in AP Junior English. I scanned slowly, trying to waste time. Virginia Woolf was crazy, but brilliant. I felt bad for her, though at the same time I knew that she was probably a very pretentious person because she knew, and everyone else did too, that she was a genius. Nabokov was an obscure name, I didn’t know he was big enough to get his name on a Barnes & Noble’s mural.

Then there were mugs. All cafés sell mugs. I think it’s a little odd, but I liked these ones, and I considered buying one. But at $7.50, I was a little skeptical. I reminded myself that I don’t drink coffee, or tea. And when I rarely do have hot chocolate, it is winter. And the seasons had just passed back into spring a few days ago. But the pattern at least was interesting, pink and orange deco O’s. Then there were the little books, sold for less than $5, but about things that most people probably weren’t interested in reading. What my children have taught me showed poor parenting. Parents teach children, not the other way around, duh.

There was a man sitting with his computer plugged into a power outlet. I wondered why he decided to do work in a bookstores café. Maybe he likes the eclecticism of the constant stream of people, in and out. Or maybe the free wireless services. The café sold Cheesecake Factory cupcakes and cheesecakes. I really wanted one, but I had no intention of sitting down. The place was crowded. It was a Saturday night. That didn’t make sense. Saturday nights were alright for fighting, not for drinking coffee and reading magazines.

All these thoughts raced through my mind rather quickly. One thought would lead unexplainably to a larger idea, but I wouldn’t be able to finish it, and I’d find something superficial to captivate my interest.

I think I finally got to the front of the line. I put down my orange juice, and asked for a sugar cookie I had unconsciously been eyeing prior. My voice was very soft, very quiet. If it was any louder, it would quake and waiver and it would sound as if I was either a) crazy or b) about to cry. I tried to indicate things with head movements, nods and shakes. Talking made me upset. The only thing that should be in my mouth right now is that sugar cookie, not silly words. Yes I would like a cookie; can’t you see that I’m nearly dead? Or maybe not, since I keep my composure well. I only have $6, if it costs anymore, I may just run away with the orange juice. But it’s four-something, thank goodness. She hands me a tremendous and crumpled white bag with my cookie inside. I have too many things in my hands I realize, and I walk very slowly so I don’t drop anything. My wallet somehow finds its way into my tight pockets. I carefully pop open the cap of my juice. It’s a loud snap, I think it scares a small boy, but I can’t really tell since my peripheral vision is, well, it’s not very good at all. It might not have even been a small boy. It very well could’ve been a little girl in boyish clothes.

I go through two sets of doors before I hit the outside. I stop walking to take a large gulp. The orange juice is bitter, sour. It’s not like the sugar loaded Tropicana I’m used to accompanying my many cereals. I sneak around the outside of the parking lot so that nobody follows me to my car and waits for me to pull out. I fully intend to sit inside of it and drink and eat until I’m merry enough to drive away, and that could take anywhere from two minutes to fifteen.

I reach my leather interior and turn on the radio. I feel so sneaky, that I am mildly proud of myself. Just the mere imagination of espionage makes me giddy. Yet when I look around, there is a man in the car next to me doing the exact same thing. Just sitting there, in his car. I lock my door. People are scary. Especially if you’re blood sugar is low. I fiddle with the radio and then fiddle with my cookie. It is very sugary, it makes up for the low quality of the orange juice. When I finish both of them, I look over and the man is no longer sitting in his car. He must be very, very sneaky, I think, because I can’t remember hearing him leave, and my radio wasn’t even that loud. I toss the white paper bag on the ground, turn on my car engine, turn on my lights, and put the car in reverse.

Hypoglycemia always loses, even if it does get close.