My Symptoms Have a Group Chat

There is a group chat in my body and I cannot leave it. I have tried. Leaving the group means leaving the body, and the body has my stuff in it. So I stay, muted where I can, admin in name only, watching the same four people post all day and all night.

Fatigue does its best work before sunrise and considers my sleep a scheduling conflict, not a boundary. Brain Fog has started a sentence it has no intention of finishing and will reference it later as though I should know what it meant. Pain only types in caps, loud by nature, and will follow with a string of updates nobody requested. Stiffness rarely types. Stiffness reacts, thumbs-up the most inconvenient messages, then goes quiet by the door for the rest of the day.

The thread devolves from here. Someone @s me. They always @ me. I am the admin, after all, the one person in the chat who is expected to manage the others while also being made entirely out of them. Pain has begun forwarding today's content to tomorrow, distributing the flare across the rest of the week with no regard for my calendar. I react with a single thumbs-down. It changes nothing. It never changes anything. The thumbs-down is just me, on the record, dissenting.

Fatigue does not mean goodnight. Fatigue means it will reappear at 4 a.m. with "you up," and we will run the whole thread again. I put my phone down. The body keeps it. The group is still typing.