The Floating Malaise

I pulled all the pots and pans and bowls and gadgets out of my kitchen cabinets five days ago, because I had A Great Plan about how I was going to rearrange everything so that there was no more of the shoving of pots into too small of a space and the cramming of cookie sheets into mountains of metal and then simply counting the seconds until the next avalanche. But that was before the malaise.

Yes, I'm well aware nobody has used that word since the Victorian era. But it's the only way to describe how I've been feeling these past four or five days. All swoony and floaty and just-not-quite-tethered-to-the-earth-y. Cold sweats out of nowhere. Exhaustion overtaking me at bizarre times. It got so bad in bed the other night that I had to wake Baroy to ask him to put an arm around me to keep me on the bed, because I just wasn't sure I wouldn't drift away without something solid anchoring me. I worried myself into my first-ever "classic" panic attack, the kind where you begin to panic that you're going to die of a heart attack, which makes your heart race, which makes you even more convinced about the impending heart attack...and so on and so on and so on. Mostly, I was worried that I was going to faint in my sleep, so tenuous was my hold on voluntary consciousness. And that led to wondering whether you can faint in your sleep, or if that's some sort of medical impossibility. Which led to wondering how you would even know if you did faint in your sleep, and how would you be able to 'come to?' Which led to wondering if this was even something I needed to be worrying about, considering I'd worked myself into such a lather by that point that I was clearly going to die of a heart attack well before I would ever have a chance to faint in my sleep...

Salvation came in the form of Xanax (is there a multiple form of the word? Xanaxes?), the idea to pull my comfy chair right up in front of the fireplace, the idea to light (and then obsessively tend to until the Xanaxes kicked in) a fire in the fireplace, and my grandma's old quilt wrapped around my shoulders. But still, days later, the malaise lingers, and the exhaustion is taking over my life.

And my kitchen? Every single surface is covered with pots and pans and non-mountainous cookie sheets, waiting to find a permanent, logical home. I refuse to just give in and put them any old place, but I just don't have the strength or the energy to figure out where they 'should' go. It's pure chaos in there. I can't stand it. But I just can't do anything about it, either. Not the way I insist it must be done...i.e., perfectly, logically, I-can't-imagine-it-any-other-way, you're-a-genius-ly.

Poor Baroy. He's living in a house with a pulled-apart, uninhabitable, unuseable kitchen, and an insane wife who wakes him up at 2 am mumbling some nonsense about being scared she's going to float away, a wife who answers the question, "What's the matter?" with "I don't know. Some sort of malaise." Clearly, the man is a saint.