You wake from a fever dream thinking about scales. And make the connection between being a Libra, and how you weigh everything, want for all to be balanced and fair, while picturing the open-aired market you visited that morning with the locals and the tourists, the colors and the scents, the spices and the foods, raw and sizzling as you lay back in your lonely hotel room sweating it out, waiting for the doctor whose language you don’t speak to tell you what is wrong with you, what lurks inside that is making you sick.

Tablets that melt like sugar in your mouth appease, if only temporarily and psychologically. It’s something better than nothing. You want to get back to ground zero. It wasn’t so bad there in retrospect. Even with all its weaknesses. Pre-retching you merely and only suffered from a consistent, even state of anxiety. Simpler times.

Maybe along with the poison inside that you’re intermittently heaving, you will toss out a little of the archaic ennui, start fresh. The words “After The Retching” come to your mind, sung to the tune of “After The Loving” by Englebert Humperdink, which you heard over the airport sound system while you waited to board your flight here during a stopover in a city you will probably never intentionally visit. The song reminds you of your grandmother, which makes you smile, as you take another sip of water that you hope isn’t recontaminating you.

You lay back on the soft to the point of vindictiveness, soaked bed that you are scheduled to leave behind tomorrow but now aren’t sure, and watch the linen curtain, a textile that obscures almost nothing and also everything, blow to and fro, away from and against the cracked window the size of a bathroom mat, something you know about, and that your knees have gotten quite familiar with over the last few hours, a prayer rug of sorts, hoping you are strong enough to give in. And that help is on its way, and always will be, if you know how to identify it.