Bittersweet

Fainting Spells

When I woke it was with a splitting headache behind my eyes. This was one of the few occasions I was able to mask the pain that flashed behind my eyes with nothing more than a wince.

"Up already? That was a fast nap." I scoff at the comment while sitting up and then follow that up with a groan. There was the familiar stiffness in my body.

"New record?" I ask. Looking around for any sign of my sister or mom being around. Those two are almost always present when I wake from one of my 'naps'.

"No, you were ten minutes shy of breaking it." She faked pity with a glance up from her phone. Smiling at my widely. I chuckled and rubbed the back of my neck. Throwing one of my legs over the edge of the bed and bending the other towards myself. The pain was not receding like it usually does a majority of the time. After rubbing my temples and eyes for a few moments, I give in a ask for some pain medication.

"You sure? You don't like how drowsy they make you." Lilly looks me over warily but after meeting my eyes and seeing the contained agony in them, she concedes. Standing from bed and making her way to my dresser, she rummages through the drawer until she finds the bottle I keep hidden from my family. The prescription, one of many, the doctors have thrown my way. Sometimes I wonder if they labeled a dart board with random medications and each visit threw a new dart. They say to let my family know. That having a support system with this condition is very important.

I've told them over and over that it was not an option. There was a reason I waited until I turned eighteen to bring this to their attention. Lilly was the only support system I needed. The first time I woke in a random graveyard, not being able to remember a thing from the last day and a half, Lilly was there. She rushed to where I was and made an excuse to my family. One they believed and I stayed over at her house for another day. Trying to understand why I could not remember anything and how I ended up at the graveyard.

Lilly and I cried and panicked and exhausted each other with questions that neither one of us wanted to ask for the entirety of that evening. She was my rock, we had always been friends, but that day over a year ago solidified our friendship for good. From then on she vowed to always be there for me, and I vowed the same. Arms linked for hours after while we fell asleep watching our favorite show.

She and I joke every now and then how convenient it would have been if we were able to fall in love. But neither of us saw each other in that sense. We were cursed to be straight the day we were born. One of us more cursed than the other.

Pills ricocheting off the walls of a plastic bottle startled my conscious back into the present moment. Lilly was waving the bottle inches from my faces. "Don't say I didn't warn you." She says in a sing song tone. I scrunch up my nose. I hated swallowing pills, but the insistent thrum behind my eyes left me little choice. I grabbed the bottle and stood on wobbly legs. They felt heavy and overstimulated. Like I had run a marathon earlier that day.

I was not the most athletic person in the world, but I did run the occasional mile or two with Lilly. She has been training for a marathon the past couple of months and she is up to twelve miles without feeling like her lungs will implode. I will usually come by and run her cool off miles with her.

"You seem to be more out of it than usual." I didn't want it to, but her worried expression frustrated me.

"I know where you are going with that." I state. Trying to shut her down before she powered on fully.

"I am just worried." She huffs. Knowing I am not in the mood to hear any of this but knowing she can't stop once she started either. "It seems to be getting worse. They are getting shorter and shorter but draining you more and more." She stands next to me and I step around her while trying to twist the bottle open. Finding I can't seem to find the strength to pop the damn lid off.