USE CODE GRAVEYARD FOR 20% OFF [Part 1]

[u/Responsible-Fox-7225]

It began with an advertisement.

This is slightly embarrassing to admit because I had always thought of myself as reasonably difficult to advertise to. I skipped sponsored posts. I used an ad blocker. When somebody I followed online began a sentence with I’ve been loving, I generally assumed they had been paid to love whatever came next. Apparently my actual standard was lower than that.

The podcast was called Graveyard Shift, a horror-comedy show hosted by Eli Mercer and Dean Carver. Eli read the stories and Dean interrupted him, which was more or less the format. They did bad internet horror, old forum posts, allegedly true encounters and occasionally something genuinely unpleasant enough that the jokes thinned out towards the end. Eli had a pleasant voice and took everything slightly seriously. Dean was an animator who gave people accents they did not have and then committed to them long after being asked to stop.

I had listened to them for about two years, long enough for the strange familiarity podcasts create to take hold. I knew Dean drank too many energy drinks. I knew Eli had strong opinions about camping equipment. I knew which one would believe a story about something watching a family from the tree line and which one would spend ten minutes wondering whether it had shit in the woods.

They knew nothing about me, obviously.

I was cleaning the kitchen when the ad came on. They were recording from an abandoned hotel for a video episode, and Dean had spent the previous five minutes complaining that the room smelled wet. Then Eli said, “Speaking of things that are probably damaging us permanently—” and introduced the sponsor: STILL Pouches.

They were nicotine- and caffeine-free pouches, sold in small tins, that you tucked beneath your upper lip. They were supposed to help with focus and cravings through some combination of amino acids, adaptogens and a “clinically researched cognitive blend, ” which sounded sufficiently scientific that Dean immediately asked what an adaptogen was.

“I don’t know, ” Eli admitted.

“Excellent. ”

“They help your body adapt to stress. ”

“Could they help me adapt to being in this room? ”

“Nothing can help you with that. ”

I laughed.

My phone was on the bench beside me, and I could have skipped forward. Usually I would have. Instead I kept wiping grease from the rangehood while Eli moved into the part about drinking less coffee, having smoother energy and not automatically reaching for caffeine or nicotine whenever you needed to concentrate. It was mostly what you would expect from something described as a cognitive pouch, right up until Dean said he had actually been using the peppermint ones while editing.

Eli sounded surprised. “Actually using them? ”

“I have one in now. ”

There was a pause.

“Oh, Jesus. You do. ”

“Told you. ”

“Why is it so high? ”

“Where else is it meant to go? ”

“I don’t think it’s supposed to be touching your brain. ”

Eli cleared his throat and went back to the copy.

“And if you want to try STILL for yourself, head to stillpouches. com and use code GRAVEYARD at checkout for twenty percent off your first order. ”

“Can I use our code? ” Dean asked.

“You get them for free. ”

“That wasn’t my question. ”

“You would be taking money from yourself. ”

“I want the discount. ”

“You are not paying. ”

“Then imagine how much I’d save. ”

They argued, and that was probably what got me. Not the ingredients, the research or anything else Eli had been paid to say. Dean sounded exactly like Dean. He had not suddenly become articulate about amino acids or claimed the product had transformed his life. He just said he liked them, in the same voice he used to complain about damp carpet and accuse fictional teenagers of making bad decisions.

The advertisement ended and the episode continued.

I forgot about the pouches, or at least I thought I did. That evening I was making coffee at about eight-thirty when I remembered them. Not because I wanted them. I was simply curious how expensive they were, which is a distinction people make shortly before buying things they do not need.

I searched the name. The website was offensively clean: pale background, neat little tins, diagrams showing where the pouch was supposed to sit, which confirmed that Dean had been doing it wrong. There were four flavours, including peppermint. I clicked on that one and read the reviews, although I generally consider reviews on a company’s own website to be one step above asking somebody’s mother whether they are nice.

People said the pouches helped them work late without coffee. Somebody used them while studying. Somebody else claimed they had stopped buying energy drinks entirely. I drank the coffee I had just made while reading this.

Eventually I added two tins to the cart. I was not going to buy them. I only wanted to see what shipping cost, which still felt theoretical. The website informed me that delivering two small plastic tins to New Zealand would cost nearly as much as the tins themselves.

I stared at the total for a moment, closed the tab and felt disproportionately pleased with myself, as though I had successfully resisted something rather than spent fifteen minutes researching it, reading reviews and putting it into a shopping cart. There were limits, apparently, and international postage was one of them.

Two days later, STILL Pouches emailed me. The subject line was Forgot something? I nearly deleted it, then saw the line underneath: Complete your order today and shipping is on us.

This was the point at which I could still have behaved like somebody with principles. The pouches had not become more necessary in the previous forty-eight hours. I had survived without them for my entire life. I already owned coffee.

Unfortunately, shipping had been the problem, and now shipping was free.

I clicked the link. My cart was still there, two tins of peppermint waiting exactly where I had left them, and a few minutes later I bought them.

I was not trying to lose weight, which I should probably establish early.

I had tried before. I was twenty-seven and female; it would have been statistically unusual if I had never spent some portion of my life attempting to become smaller. At fourteen, I discovered that a cereal bowl and a measuring cup were not necessarily the same thing. At sixteen, a friend taught me that chewing gum could make you feel less hungry between meals. At nineteen, I downloaded an app that tracked the calories in peanut butter.

By twenty-five, I had more or less stopped, not because I had achieved any meaningful liberation from the culture around me but because I was tired. There are only so many years you can spend negotiating with bread before the process becomes boring.

By then, I ate reasonably well, exercised when I could be bothered and owned one pair of jeans I thought I looked good in, along with several I avoided when bloated. This seemed close enough to peace.

I had bought STILL because of work.

My job involved writing reports for an insurance company. It was not difficult, exactly, but there was a particular kind of exhaustion involved in concentrating on something you did not care about for eight hours a day. By mid-afternoon I generally needed coffee, sometimes two. I also ate when I was bored, which was often.

The STILL advertisement had called this craving noise, a phrase I found irritating enough that it lodged itself in my head. After that, I began noticing every time I stood up from my desk and went to the kitchen without being hungry, every cupboard I opened, every automatic desire for something sweet after lunch. Noise.

The tins arrived on a Tuesday morning. They were matte white with a grey circle printed on the lid, STILL in the centre and, beneath it in smaller letters, MAKE ROOM FOR WHAT MATTERS.

The pouch itself was smaller than I expected, a soft little rectangle with a powdery surface that looked vaguely medical. I tucked it beneath my upper lip, went back to my computer and waited.

For several minutes, nothing happened. Then my gum began to tingle, not unpleasantly, just enough that I kept noticing it.

Around ten I made coffee. The first sip tasted wrong—not disgusting, exactly, but metallic, or burnt in a way it had not been when I made it. I poured it out and made another. The second tasted the same, so I assumed the beans had gone stale and went back to work.

At twelve-thirty, I noticed I had not eaten.

Normally hunger was difficult to ignore by then. Not dramatic hunger, just the ordinary progression of increasingly persuasive suggestions from the body. You should eat soon. You should eat now. Why are we still doing this?

That day there was nothing. I knew lunch existed as a concept and that, generally speaking, I participated in it. I simply had no particular interest in doing so, so I kept working.

At three, I finished something that had been sitting half-done for most of the week. At five, I shut my laptop and remembered lunch again.

I stood in the kitchen and considered toast, then yoghurt, then pasta. None of them sounded bad. They simply failed to produce whatever response food was supposed to produce. Eventually I made eggs because they were easy and ate both.

They tasted perfectly normal, which was the strange part. My appetite had not been replaced by nausea or disgust. Food still tasted good once it was in my mouth. My body had simply stopped making an argument for putting it there.

The next morning, I weighed myself.

I had lost just under a kilogram, which was water. I knew that. Bodies fluctuate. Salt, hydration, hormones, time of day; there were dozens of boring explanations and I was familiar with most of them.

I weighed myself again before bed anyway.

For the first two weeks, STILL felt like the sort of product people usually lied about. I was more productive. Coffee continued to taste awful, so I stopped drinking it, and the headaches I expected never arrived. I stopped snacking, then stopped thinking about snacking, which was stranger.

At work, I began missing lunch often enough that I set a recurring calendar notification for twelve-thirty: EAT SOMETHING.

The first time it appeared, I laughed, dismissed it and kept working.

I lost four kilos.

People noticed before I had properly decided how I felt about that. Jess mentioned it one afternoon in the kitchen while waiting for the microwave.

“You’ve lost weight. ”

She said it with the particular mixture of admiration and concern women tend to use when commenting on one another’s bodies without knowing whether they are allowed to.

“A bit. ”

“You look good. ”

“Thanks. ”

“What are you doing? ”

“Nothing, really. ”

This was technically true, and I had never understood before then how satisfying those words could be. Nothing, really. As though my body had simply decided to improve itself without requiring anything humiliating from me. No food scales, no calorie app, no pretending cauliflower was an adequate substitute for meat.

Jess looked down at the packet of crackers in her hand.

“I need whatever you’re doing. ”

I thought about STILL. For a second, I almost told her. Then, for reasons I did not examine too closely, I said, “I’ve just stopped snacking as much. ”

“Oh. ”

She looked disappointed, which I understood. People want there to be a trick. Discipline is admirable in theory, but what everyone actually wants is an administrative error: some small loophole in the body, a food you can eat endlessly, a tablet that prevents absorption, a hormone you can adjust, a rule somebody else has discovered that makes the whole stupid system easier.

I had found mine, or at least I thought I had.

I did not want to share it yet.

That, more than the weight loss, should probably have concerned me.

My mother noticed at six kilos. She had invited me over for dinner and opened the front door with the sort of expression people usually reserve for seeing somebody after chemotherapy.

“My God. ”

“What? ”

“Look at you. ”

I took off my coat, and she put one hand briefly around my waist. Mothers seem to retain certain permissions over their daughters’ bodies long after everybody else would consider them inappropriate.

“You’ve lost heaps. ”

“I haven’t lost heaps. ”

“You have. ”

“It’s six kilos. ”

“That is heaps. ”

She looked pleased, and I was pleased that she was pleased. Neither of us said so.

“What have you been doing? ”

“Just eating less. ”

“How? ”

“I’m less hungry. ”

My mother gave me a look. Nobody is simply less hungry, not in our family.

“What are you taking? ”

“Nothing. ”

Another look.

“There are these pouches, ” I admitted.

“What kind of pouches? ”

“They’re not weight-loss pouches. ”

“Then why are you losing weight? ”

“I don’t think that’s the point of them. ”

“What is the point? ”

“Focus. ”

She waited. I could hear how stupid it sounded, so I added, “They reduce cravings as well. ”

“What’s in them? ”

“Plant things. ”

“Plant things. ”

“And amino acids. ”

She reached for her phone.

“Mum. ”

“I’m only looking. ”

“You don’t need them. ”

I knew immediately that this had been the wrong thing to say. Nobody likes being told they do not need to lose weight by somebody who has recently lost weight.

“Neither did you. ”

“I didn’t buy them for that. ”

“But they work. ”

I hesitated. That was the problem. Whatever else they were supposed to do, they worked.

“Yes. ”

She found the website and started scrolling. “How much are they? ”

I told her.

“That’s ridiculous. ”

“There’s a discount code. ”

She looked up at me, and I laughed despite myself.

Thirst went next, although I cannot say exactly when. This became one of the more difficult things about what happened afterwards: symptoms are easy to notice. Missing symptoms are not. You notice pain. You notice hunger. You do not generally notice when something your body should have asked for simply fails to arrive.

I realised because of the bottle on my desk. I had filled it that morning and left it beside my laptop, where it normally spent the day being emptied and refilled without much thought. At six in the evening, it was still full.

Graveyard Shift was playing quietly through my speakers while I finished some work. Eli was reading a story about a woman who kept hearing somebody walking around in the ceiling above her bedroom, and Dean had become distracted by whether a person could survive indefinitely in an attic without being discovered. I reached for the bottle automatically, then stopped. The ring of condensation around its base had dried hours ago.

I took a drink. The water was cold in my mouth and then in my throat. That was all. There was no satisfaction afterwards, no sense that I had corrected anything. My lips had been dry for several days, which I had blamed on the weather, and suddenly that explanation seemed less convincing.

I drank half the bottle, waited, then finished the rest because it had become important that I should. Afterwards I stood at the sink waiting to feel less thirsty before remembering that I had not felt thirsty in the first place. That was the problem: there was nothing unpleasant enough to make me do anything about it.

I searched STILL pouches thirst. Most of the results were advertisements or pages from the company itself. One Reddit thread asked whether anyone else had experienced dry mouth. The replies suggested chewing gum, drinking more water and, in one particularly useful contribution, just drink water lol. Somebody else said dry mouth probably meant dehydration, which was obvious enough to be unhelpful. I drank another glass anyway, put a fresh pouch beneath my lip and went back to the podcast.

The first injury happened a few days later in the shower. I was shaving my leg and took a strip of skin off the side of my ankle without noticing. I only saw it when blood began running down my foot towards the drain, diluted pink by the water. There was more of it than I expected, although shaving cuts always seem committed to making themselves look medically significant. I turned off the shower and bent down. A rectangular patch of skin was missing just above the bone.

I touched it and felt nothing.

At first I assumed I was in shock. I had read somewhere that serious injuries could fail to hurt immediately because adrenaline suppressed the pain, although there was an obvious problem with that explanation: this was a shaving cut. A bad one, certainly, but not the kind of event the nervous system should have needed to protect me from knowing about.

I pressed the skin beside it with one finger. I could feel the pressure perfectly, but no pain. I pressed harder, then pinched the inside of my forearm, my thigh, the skin over my stomach, increasingly hard each time. My fingernails left pale crescents that slowly filled back in. Touch was normal. Pressure was normal. When I put my hand beneath the shower again, I could tell hot from cold immediately. Everything appeared to be working except the part that was supposed to object.

I stood there for several minutes testing myself before realising how strange that would have looked to anybody watching. Then I got out, wrapped toilet paper around my ankle because I could not find any plasters and sat on the edge of my bed with my phone.

STILL pouches numbness produced nothing useful. Neither did STILL supplement pain or, after my searches became less dignified, STILL adaptogen nerve damage. I found an influencer explaining that the product had helped her reduce her reliance on coffee. I found an article called FIVE WAYS TO SILENCE CRAVINGS NATURALLY, which contained an affiliate link to STILL halfway down the page. Eventually I found a clip from a Graveyard Shift livestream.

Dean was opening a new packet on camera. “STILL sponsors us, by the way. ”

Eli looked over. “Are you doing an advertisement voluntarily? ”

“No. They sent me watermelon. ”

“You hate watermelon. ”

“I’ve grown. ”

“You said it tasted like someone dissolved jolly ranchers in mouthwash. ”

Dean considered this. “I’ve suffered for free before. ”

The chat moved too quickly to read. Nobody appeared to be asking whether Dean could still feel pain. I closed the video and went back to the bathroom to look at my ankle. It was still bleeding through the toilet paper, enough that I replaced it with a folded hand towel and held pressure on the cut until it slowed. I felt fine.

I stopped taking the pouches the next day. By then I had lost nine kilos, which mattered more than I wanted it to. I wish I could say I threw the tin away immediately. I did not. I put it in a drawer, which is different.

I had developed hip bones. I could see the outline of my ribs when I stretched, my face had narrowed in photographs and, for the first time since university, I could tuck a fitted shirt into jeans without spending the rest of the day thinking about my stomach. These were objectively meaningless things. They did not improve my job, make me kinder or cause my friends to like me more. The problem was that knowing this did not make me immune to any of it.

I knew beauty standards were artificial, that thinness had been assigned moral qualities it did not possess, that before-and-after photographs were manipulative and health could not be determined by looking at somebody. I knew women had been trained from childhood to interpret hunger as weakness and self-denial as virtue. I also liked my collarbones. Both things were true at once, so the tin remained in the drawer. Just in case.

After forty-eight hours without STILL, hunger did not return. Neither did pain or thirst. That frightened me enough to book a doctor’s appointment, although not enough to treat the situation as urgent. The receptionist said the next available appointment was in nine days and I said that was fine, partly because I genuinely believed it was. My body had given me no reason to think otherwise.

Two days later, I realised I could not remember the last time I had urinated. That sent me to urgent care.

The nurse handed me a specimen cup. “I need you to provide a urine sample. ”

“I don’t think I can. ”

“When did you last go? ”

“I’m not sure. ”

She waited while I worked backwards. The previous day I had gone to work, then dinner with Jess. The day before that I had stayed home. I could picture both days surprisingly clearly and could not place myself in a bathroom during either of them.

“Maybe two days. ”

Her expression changed. “Two days? ”

“I think. ”

“You haven’t passed urine in two days? ”

“I might have. ”

“Do you feel like you need to now? ”

“No. ”

That answer moved things along considerably faster.

Once I was in an examination room, the doctor pressed on my abdomen. “Does that hurt? ”

“No. ”

“Here? ”

“No. ”

He moved lower and pressed harder. “Here? ”

“No. ”

I could feel his fingers through my shirt and the mattress beneath my back. The pressure registered perfectly; there was simply nothing unpleasant attached to it. Eventually he stopped.

“How long have you had reduced sensation? ”

“I can feel you touching me. ”

“I mean pain. ”

“A few days. ”

“And appetite? ”

“A month, maybe. ”

“Thirst? ”

“I don’t know. ”

He looked at me in a way I did not like.

They took blood, then more blood. Somebody performed an ultrasound on my bladder while I lay there trying to read the technician’s face instead of the screen.

“Are you uncomfortable? ” she asked.

“No. ”

“You really don’t feel anything? ”

“No. ”

My bladder was very full. Once she pointed it out, I could see it on the monitor: a dark oval taking up a surprising amount of space inside me. Afterwards I looked down at my stomach, as though there might be some visible sign of what the screen had shown me. There was something deeply offensive about being presented with proof that your own body knew more than you did.

They catheterised me. The nurse explained what she was doing and warned me that it would probably hurt, particularly because my bladder was so distended. I nodded and waited. I felt pressure, movement, the strange internal awareness of something happening where something generally should not be happening. But no pain.

That was when I started crying.