15
I lay in bed, growing so stifled a fine sweat forms across my brow. I shouldn’t be sweating – it’s not hot – and when I push the covers down to my waist, I immediately feel the cold. Now I’m in two different climates: from the waist-down, I’m too hot, and from the waist-up I’m freezing. Here’s a side-effect of the Aropax – hot flushes. I’m only thirty or so, and struggling to reconcile what Aropax does to me. There are so many problems, but before I started them I had crippling OCD, and had been agoraphobic and living effectively as a shut-in for five years. This is the trade-off.…
14
I wake and can’t move. I’m just twelve. My brother sleeps in his bed, his snoring rhythmic. I can’t call to him, can’t tell him I can’t breathe, can’t tell him I can’t move, can’t cry out to him that I need help. I am incapable of everything but the awareness that I am awake and paralyzed. Earlier in the evening, I watched a TV show that talked about sleep paralysis. They described just this, and said that the inability to breathe was due to a ghost, or entity, sitting on the victim’s chest, sucking the air out of their lungs. I don’t see anything. But the terror fills me…