Rasta

...means "twelve" in Quenya. The emphasis is on the first "a", so not like the hairdo word of English.

Insert a few tittering, half-mad giggles and bits of laughter here. After I crawled my way to a doctor and said doctor didn't listen entirely but still decided to give me some medicine for my lungs, I thought hey, this isn't so bad. I've been using the little inhaler with a brown bottom every day, and the one with a blue, when needed. Just as it was intended.
However.
(Of course there's an however. There always is).
It is said that sometimes, it takes a few weeks for the medicine to really start working. Does that also apply to the drawbacks and side effects, too? Because if it does, then I hit one of the worse ones. Of course, but, still. It could just as well have a lot to do with the general darkness of the days - there's not a lot of daylight, though there's only one week left before it goes better again - or the rather disturbing experience with the fight on the commuter train, or... well, the fact that I'm in a city and people are looking strangely at me. (And as for me, it seems that wherever I look I see them - humans, all around, and all carrying a bit of darkness, like something sticky clinging to them. All their lost hopes, their petty angers and annoyances, their crimes and their ugly secrets, their bad self-esteem and their intolerance, it is as if I can almost see it. I have felt this for some time, but suddenly I could actually put words to it). Or, just, you know, being their own little selves.
The short of the long is, I am getting increasingly uncomfortable and, well, paranoid. Today I could hardly force myself to go to the little corner store and get something to put on my bread for tomorrow morning. And in the store, it was all I could do not to hyperventilate and drop everything and get the hell out of there. Humans, humans everwhere. A family with two young kids running around. People talking about really stupid stuff and yet saying nothing.

It feels like a bad case of paranoia and skittishness. If it's the medicine, then good, I can counter it by that knowledge. But if it isn't, well... I don't know. Maybe I should use it to be allowed to stay away from people. To sit inside my room just painting. After all, if I have to have all those stupid, small and big, illnesses, then I could just as well use them, I guess.

...I really don't like being around people. Some cities are all right. Some better than others. This particular one has me up the walls with discomfort. Everywhere I go there's the small nagging suspicion that someone might hurt me, deliberately or through a bigger action of intending-to-hurt.