Severe Belching

You know it: that belching that cannot be suppressed. Not the occasional burp after a hurried meal — but this recurring, forceful belching that seems to come from nowhere. In the middle of a conversation, in the silence, at your desk, at night in bed. Your body presses something upward that refuses to be held back. Air that must escape. Pressure searching for a valve.

Perhaps you have already had everything medically investigated. Perhaps you are told it is stress, perhaps diet, perhaps habit. And yet this feeling remains: there is something that wants to come out. Something that cannot be swallowed — in the literal as well as the figurative sense.