IS IT JUST ME OR DID I DIE TODAY?
By KAYLEE [REDACTED]
ART BY KAYLEE [REDACTED]
As far as I remember, I have always been afraid of death — it’s only a natural response to the unknown.
Sometimes something triggers that fight or flight in your head, your full body. Even if it’s minor you can’t stop it. Sometimes your body is just screaming at you that something is wrong. To me, it’s better to overreact than underreact and pay for the mistakes later. The overreaction is an embarrassment itself. I’ve passed out a few times in my life, in public nonetheless, and have felt this deep fear of death only to awaken deeply embarrassed surrounded by my peers in some nurse’s office of a public school or medic room of a concert hall. I hate being the center of attention — even more so when it's because I took some sort of brutal tumble to the ground, projectile vomited, or am begging everyone for Tums. Showing others a side of yourself that's incredibly vulnerable and intimate and incidentally showing it to 15 people you barely know is showing a human side that your acquaintances were never meant to see. It’s humbling.
Fear of death through some uncontrolled and unidentifiable concept wreaking havoc within you is a pretty common anxiety-inducing phenomenon, but it seems to me that I feel it much more often than others. I don’t know why, but I’ve always been this way. Constant trips to the school nurse's office in elementary school because I felt like I was going to pass out or, to this day, midnight searches on Google asking “which side is my appendix on” because no matter how much I am sure the appendage is in the process of bursting, I can’t remember which side it's on. This overwhelming feeling has gotten better over the last 22 years, but it still exists.
I didn’t expect a moment like this to come when I ate a chip.
A friend bought us both a $7 chip that required him to get ID’d. I thought, "surely it can’t be that serious, they just don’t want kids doing it." That’s fine — you have to show ID for spray paint. The packaging was black with a little skull like some poison bottle from a cartoon. This chip didn’t scare me. It can’t be that bad. I love spicy food. I coat almost every meal I eat in chili oil or whatever hot sauce fits it best.
Surrounded by my friends, I opened the box. My chip was broken up into a few pieces. Moments later I made the crucial mistake that surely was the culprit to such a violent reaction. I stacked up the individual pieces into a sort of super chip, like when you get a manufacturing error of a chip that is made up of several to become sort of a rock. I ate this entire stack at once.
"Hey, it’s not too bad," I'm thinking. This lasted up until I let out the first cough. That one single cough heralded the symphony of pain that was to come. Instantly, my body starts analyzing its options on how to reject this unknown invader I have put into my body. All alarms are going off.
There was a moment after I ingested the chip where my body turned on me. It said to me, “You Have Made A Mistake. You Will Die For It.” That’s truly what it felt like. My body was rejecting it and punishing me in order to save itself. A fear like this is primal, it's ancient. The body has one mission and that is to keep working correctly and when something throws a wrench in the eternal machine, of course it will have an issue.
It’s a strange feeling between realizing something is wrong and when you ultimately throw up. We’ve all felt it, but it feels like you are on the edge of doom, ready to collapse, and praying for the end of it. Please just let me throw up. I’ll never eat contaminated food again — I swear. I’ve learned my lesson, I won’t get takeout ever again. I’ll buy a farm, I’ll grow my own food, I’ll know exactly where it came from. Then you throw up and forget any promises you made. When will any of us learn?
My body quickly tried to correct my mistakes. I threw up violently for about 15 minutes then I was fine. I felt reborn by the grace of whoever decided to purge my insides. I was clean and new.
One might think I had some sort of awakening, conquering horror in the face of an unknown assailant, but the answer is no. Now I just know a chip could take me out as easily as a bullet. Maybe it’s only human to live like this.