quote: | Originally posted by Lira
Yesterday was already a mess of sneezes and sighs, the kind where your body betrays you, offering aches instead of answers. 41 year old me collapsed into bed with all the ceremony of a felled tree, and the darkness wrapped itself around me. Not soothing, but suffocating. Sleep came like a graceless thief, tripping over my congestion, stealing only half the night.
I was coughing.
A guttural, rattling cough that seemed to rise from somewhere deep and ancient, as though my lungs were trying to expel the weight of the world. My wife, half angel, half sleep-deprived soldier, placed a cough drop in my hand. It was one of those industrial-strength, throat-numbing marvels that promises relief in exchange for a flavour that tastes like desperation.
Somewhere between the fog of dreams and the sharp tang of menthol, I reached for another. My hand moved on autopilot, like a sleepwalker rummaging for solace, and I grabbed one � larger, softer, with odd, flabby edges. Too tired to question the geometry of my salvation, I let it settle on my tongue. It wasn�t sweet, wasn�t bitter, wasn�t anything. Just... there. And that was enough. I chewed the edges experimentally, deciding it was a conglomerate of cough drops fused together by some act of cosmic stickiness. I was grateful, in a hazy, delirious way, that it wasn�t a beetle. Or worse, alive.
Morning came like a revelation and a betrayal when I reached for the thing inside my mouth. And there it was: the truth. Not a cough drop, but an earbud. The flabby edge I had chewed with unconscious diligence was silicone, not sugar. Its sleek technology rendered mute by my misplaced hunger for relief.
I stared at it, the absurdity of the situation hitting me like the punchline to a joke I didn�t know I was telling. I had spent the night, in all my fevered vulnerability, suckling on technology. And now, it was dead�sacrificed to the altar of my unconsciousness. Never did anything remotely similar when I was younger.
For the record, it no longer works. |
LOL, this is amazing. 
Not quite the response you're asking for, but I need reading glasses. Realized it just after my 44th birthday. If it wasn't for doing the NYT puzzles every morning I don't think I'd have noticed. The full eye health exam is so cool! Lots of really neat equipment.
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