clicking away from reality

a bout with vertigo

the day started off well:

meditation in the predawn outside,

an intense, wonderful, fast 3 mile hike with my faster wife,

a good breakfast of waffles and eggs,

then my lower areas started feeling unsettled,

I considered getting things done,

but decided to just doze in my chair,

we got a call from our son,

and I enjoyed the oral visit,

afterwards, though, I felt more unsettled,

the world and me not quite one,

and it was I who was distancing himself

from comfortably clicking into the moment,

my attachment mechanism glitching,

I headed back out into our Great Room,

where my wife was sitting and reading,

and plaintively announced I was feeling off, weird,

I sat back in my chair,

and the world started to shimmer,

the world outside my eyes not stable,

but shifting from right to left,

as if the frame of the movie within which I move

were possessed by a recursive glitch

that denied stability, continuity,

a sense that I fit into time, seamless,

rather I was falling down a rabbit hole,

and only Lewis Carroll seemed to know

the malleability of reality that my eyes insisted upon,

as if to ground me, my stomach turned queasy,

the EMTs got here and capably, sweetly, dealt with me,

questions and tests of heart and blood,

all to see if I was being carried away

quickly from this reality,

no big alarms sounded,

and I visited with them pretty well,

discussing pictures of the West, and our trip to Iceland,

a month before one of the EMTs had been there,

I dropped the name of Gullfoss, an amazing waterfall there,

we get to the Emergency Room,

spend 6 hours there,

with nausea asserting itself,

vertigo declining in power, then roaring back,

my sweat pouring off me,

as my stomach emptied and re-emptied,

my wife wonderfully supportive and grounding,

CT scans of head and lower abdomen,

blood work, vital signs—

all refused to tell the end,

I closed my eyes, drifted back toward normality,

they released me after 6 hours, 

after 4 hours of possession by nauseous vertigo,

for some reason an exorcism worked,

my system threw off the demon

assaulting my inner ear,

the world again with me, and I with it,

the chasm is still out there,

and sometime its call will be real and final.

by Henry H. Walker

October 23, ‘17