His finger drew a lock of my hair away from my face and tucked it behind my ear affectionately. “I’m glad. What time is the appointment?”
“First thing. Eight thirty.” I blew out a breath. “Probably a good thing, to get it over with before I have a whole day to ramp up the anxiety in advance.”
“Probably,” he agreed, then tipped his wrist so he could look down at his watch. “It’s five twenty-eight. As much as I have anearly uncontrollable urge to tuck you into bed, it’s probably a little early for that, huh?”
I mustered up a weak smile of agreement for him.
“I have my Kindle in my backpack,” he said. “What do you say we cuddle and read for a while? Maybe the cats will grace us with their presence, even. And then in an hour or two, we can think about ordering in some dinner, and then I’ll put you to bed. Possibly with a benzo on board.”
“I don’t -”
“We’ll see,” he said before I could complete my protest. “Possibly you won’t need it. But just keep it in mind as an option if you start getting up in your head. This is a really stressful situation and it would be totally reasonable to need to deploy the emergency medication. I don’t want you tonotuse the tools you have available to you because you get anxious about using them for your anxiety.”
Hmph. How dare he have a point. “Fine,” I acknowledged. “You sound like you’ve had this conversation before.”
“Charlie,” he said with a nod. “Like I’ve said, you’re not my first rodeo.”
I couldn’t decide if I really wanted to meet Jamison’s sister, or if I was terrified of meeting her. I had the feeling she’d see into my brain effortlessly, which could be either really good or really bad, depending on whether she intended to use her powers for good or evil. And depending on how protective she was of her brother. Hell, she probably already hated me for putting her beloved brother at risk of HIV; if she found out I was positive now? Yikes.
I decided on the spot I didn’t want to meet her.
“You’re thinking hard,” he said, gently laying me against the back of my couch and standing up to retrieve his Kindle and the book I had dog-eared on the coffee table for me. “I know I keep telling you to relax, but, well…relax.”
I rolled my eyes at that. And depressed people should just be happy, and diabetic people should just think their blood sugar to normal levels. Uh-huh. Sometimes it was very clear that as much as Jamison had experience with his sister’s anxiety, he didn’t have experiencelivinganxiety. It would be mean to point that out, though, so I just accepted the book he passed me without comment and opened it to the page I’d left folded over.
Yes, I knew that dog-earing my pages made me basically Satan's minion. Fuck everyone; it was my book and I’d disrespect it if it made my life easier, and god knew I could never lay hands on a bookmark when I needed one. So dog-earing it was.
Jamison shot me a side-eye as he settled back on the couch, but said nothing about my page recall method. Instead, he settled back against the arm of the couch and wrapped his arm around my shoulders again, gently drawing me down into his lap until I could pillow my head there. I sank in with a sigh and focused on the page I’d left off on.
I spent the next hour alternating being lost in the book and then periodically surfacing back to reality and a fast-beating heart as the real-life situation popped back into my head. Every time, my breathing would speed up and my heart would start to pound, and every time, without looking up from his reading, Jamison would increase the weight of the arm he had laying across my chest and start stroking his fingers soothingly across my shirt. It was like he knew. And hell, maybe he did. My breathing was probably far from silent. But he didn’t comment, and he didn’t remind me to (ugh)relax. We didn’t talk about my anxiety or about the situation. We just…existed together. It was wonderful, as much as anything shot through with anxiety could be wonderful.
At some point, without me noticing it was happening, I dozed off again. A while later, he managed to wake me up enough to getsome takeout into me, and then I immediately passed out again, this time with my head pillowed on his thigh. He woke me up a second time an unknown amount of time later to haul me to my bed, and out I went again, with no need for the dreaded Xanax.
I slept until the following morning.
19
Jamison
Week 13 - Friday
Hen was bouncing off the walls with anxiety by the time we got home from the doctor’s office the next morning. The appointment had been anti-climatic in a lot of ways, the doctor reserving judgment on much of anything until the results of the more specific tests came in. She’d written a prescription for antiretrovirals that he was to begin taking immediately - “as a precaution”, she’d said - and she’d urged him to do some research about living with HIV. I strongly suspected the hard part would be to get him tostopresearching - could you doomscroll research?
By the time we got back to his house, Hen was utterly drained from holding himself together. When he reached for his Xanax bottle, I knew he was just Done, with a capital D. I watched him swallow the pill dry and wished there was something, anything I could do.
And yes, I wished my test results would come in so I knew where I stood, but I wasn’t going to mention that to Hen. Heneeded the added stress of my worry like he needed a hole in the head. So I held it together for him, urging him into bed and stroking his hair and talking soothingly to him as the benzo took effect and he first fell into a doze and then started snoring lightly.
And then I went into the living room, picked up my phone, and started obsessively checking my notifications. Why weren’t my results coming in? Did the delay mean something? Probably not, I told myself; different labs just worked at different speeds, and it probably just so happened that Hen’s doctor used a different lab than mine did.
That didn’t help my anxiety much, I mused, and then felt guilty for even thinking the wordanxietyin relation to myself when I knew that mine was nothing in comparison to Hen’s or Charlie’s.
Charlie. Should I tell her what was going on? She was my closest confidant, and she knew we were at risk and testing. And I really, really wanted to talk this anxiety (ugh) out with someone. Ultimately, though, I decided that I couldn’t in good conscience tell her about Hen’s results. It simply wasn’t my story to tell, and if he wanted others to know he’d tested positive, that washisdecision to make. But I couldn’t stop myself from checking in with Charlie to blow offsomesteam.
Me:How do you live like this?
Charlie:[blink.gif] Huh?
Me:I’m waiting for my latest test results and they’re not coming in and I’m just sitting here anxiously and obsessively checking my phone hoping they do come in and just…how do you live with anxiety as a Thing?
