I feel lucky no one was around just now to see me panic over not being able to find my bottle of anxiety meds. I was certain they were in the outer pocket my mymulti-pocketed messenger bag. But after ransacking that pocket to its slightly dirty core, I found nothing but wadded up napkins, pens, candies, lens wipes… I knew I had been thinking about moving the bottle to a more secure and less vibrational part of the bag. I had noticed that the pills appeared to be disintegrating ever so slowly, likely from the movement of the bottle as the bag rubs against my body when I walk 12 miles in a day.

Those pills are relatively delicate. The last time I traveled on an airplane I stored a bag in the overhead compartment. The much more vigorous vibration of the plane itself caused the anxiety pills to turn to sand. They were probably still ingestible via spoon or whatever but it was a lesson learned

As for just now, it is Saturday and no one else is here at the break room. Had others been around I likely would have toned down the franticness of my search. You have to understand, if I need that med and can’t find it, I burn inside. Things go white and I seem coherent and sane but really I’m blacking out everything. I found the bottle, stuffed into a less vibrational part of the bag. I moved it without remembering moving it. I was afraid it might have fallen out of the bag, landing on a sidewalk somewhere. A controlled substance with my name and address on it.

Now I feel fine. This is why I get to work so early. To write, sometimes I shit, and I do what I can to start the job with serenity. I’ve learned to panic less at the moments of the day when I have been prone to do that.

For as little as this job pays there are many things to like about it. No one has ever called me on my personal phone or emailed at my personal address. The day ends when the day ends, for the most part. THe office space itself is nothing elegant but it’s perfectly passable. The exposed ceilings are ugly af but I odn’t have to look at them. The computers and the networks seem reliable, except for yesterday and a couple of days earlier. Some random thing caused everyone to get knocked offline. That’s never happened in my nearly 2 years here, so that’s a pretty good record. Why am I talking about all this? No one cares.