I prayed for the first time in months today. I pushed back hair and pressed my forehead to steepled fingers, stretching myself diagonally across the landscape of a bed, elbows out like wings. I prayed to my grandmother, whose stroke was no surprise, whose stroke separated everything we'll remember of her from a memorable frame. Her body is still here, someplace in New Jersey, sunk into starched hospital sheets and stiff pastel blankets, but Rosie herself is elsewhere. They use the word "unresponsive." There's minute peace in knowing it was coming.
The family's reports come in over cell speakers along with texts that state--assure?--I don't need to come home. I bounce between online train schedules and old Google maps of Monmouth County, the place where Rosie raised four generations of my family.
They say she opened her eyes once but everything is glass; we look through, not into, her now. My aunt believes the liquid gaze means Rosie is still here, but my mother--the nurse, who works with death, whose life is acting both as its assistant and its adversary--has seen that look before, knows what it all means, understands how even heartbeats can be purgatory. She speaks the language of departing and is acting as our translator. The Rosetta Stone to Rose says that she is gone.
If she had died I could pass a message up to God, ask the universe to tell her that I love her and regret not coming home more, make some unseen force sing my goodbyes like a telegraph, but her body is still breathing and I don't know where a mind goes so I pray to her directly, palming an invisible microphone, broadcasting to an audience of one.
Tonight's program skips the weather, throws out the traffic, leaves out time and temp, starts with affirmations and then rambles into "sorry," evolving into a monologue that pleads for her to hear me. Unrelated thoughts interrupt like static: "Grandma Rose it's me and I don't know if you hear me (**ksssshkthe iron: on or off?ksssshk**). I don't know where you are but I want you to come visit. I want to say goodbye even though I know we did, the day with the Earl Grey and the tin of shortbread cookies, the day you tried (**ksssshkhe should have texted backksssshk**) to give me more money for shoes before cutting out that article about Madonna's H&M (**ksssshkwhere's the dog?kssssshk**) discount fashion. I never pray anymore (**kssssshkwhat's this lump?kssssshk**) and know that you would hate that, but my faith's misplaced and we need to talk so Rosie please come find me." The reception on this station is some humming kind of mess.
I keep snapping rubber bands inside in selfish flagellation, as if punishment for not dialing more is something that's productive. I wrote to her last month, two letters in two weeks; it took so little effort there should have been two dozen. They say she read them out loud to everyone who visited, a little fact that pulls two strings into a knot, tying ego and shame into one dangling loose end.
In the last letter I told her she's the reason I'm a writer, joked about the money I'd have saved if I'd studied it in college, lamented how much better I'd be if I'd studied it at all...or just done things the way she told me I should over lunch when I was 12. They say she read that part specifically over and over: "The moral is, Rosie, you should listen to your grandma."
I never wrote how my next big piece is in a New York weekly, one she could hold between her hands and tell friends to buy at newsstands. She never really understood the whole news on the Internet thing--she would have been so proud to see something in old school print.
I'm so tired this is blurry. The figures curl together. But tonight I do not sleep. I keep praying direct to Rosie, thinking she'll tune in for some part of my broadcast, check-one-twoing the mic with one hand while tracing maps of Monmouth County with the other.
This blog is having an identity crisis. It can't make up its mind about whether it wants to be a narrative of adventures linked to a gimmick, a place for general musings, a public posting place for notes scrawled on napkins or a phlebotomist. Some days, it attempts to be all four.
Tonight (read: this morning), inspired by the previous post's guest blog and Prose vs. Hoes/longform vs. poetry exhibition between the soon-to-be famous writer Hannah Miet and myself, I'm abandoning my general distain for my own poetry and tossing some up here. Because self-abuse is kind of sexy come 3:20AM.
So here, for no apparent reason and with no relation to this blog other than the fact it was written to someone I've posted about in this space, is a poem I pulled from the vaults.
UNSAID, AS YOU WERE ANGRILY CLEANING UP DINNER
I'm sorry I don't save words for you. I try to,
each morning, plug up and reserve something.
Mostly by day's end the best drain out.
The first of the day are barely worth speaking.
I croak them to baristas and doormen,
to women whose purses take up entire train seats;
sometimes, I practice on bosses.
Then "love" goes to my father, and "why" flies to my mother,
and expletives dart to tourists who halt mid-step
on the sidewalk. Loosed by noon,
phrases marked yours slide by. That joke.
That compliment. That piece of honesty.
They slip into the ears of others and I don't stop them.
Sometimes I pull a few to the side,
apples at the weigh station, perfect pearls for stringing,
but God, they age so quickly.
I wish they weren't so limp when handed over.
And of course the best ones--
the things I mean, things you need, the way I mean to say them--
struggle to survive in open air.
Written down on paper they seem trite. Which is best,
since I'd feather you in Post-It notes otherwise.
So read them in my face. Study the way I slip a finger in your palm
and trace avenues there.
Listen how I ask for nothing.
Let an egg, broken in a pan and poached in oil for you, speak.
It's a Hitch List first: A GUEST BLOG. (**Ooohs and Ahhhhs.**) Hannah Miet, of My Soul is a Butterfly, is below. I am on Hannah's blog, slinging prose.
Explanation: I am a literary nymphomaniac, untreatable and unashamed. My toes curl in paper shops. My bookshelves are promiscuity on display. I shirk social responsibilities to sequester in and read. Sometimes a passage goes by that plunges two fingers into my brain, making me squirm with jealous delight while releasing audible moans of approval. I will read almost anything. (Except artistic statements which use the word "dystopian" in the opening...sorry, just can't.)
Poetry is no exception. In fact it's more inception, some seed planted in my subconscious years ago which has since grown into a verbose piece of virulent foliage, one that needs to be watered regularly or it will whither and turn grey. Not just any verse will do...I need a powerful image. Word combinations which speak monologues. Narratives that lead me to a gingerbread house where the edible doorknob's laced with dopamine and cyanide. Shit that isn't ABAB rhyme scheme.
I've been lucky enough to meet with some poets and writers whose work is so good it simultaneously thrills me and makes me feel I should return to that Hooters in New Jersey and give up this attempt at writing altogether. Hannah Miet, of My Soul Is a Butterfly, is one of those people. Hannah creates vibrant verbal mandalas with the crumbing sand of memories, then does us the solid of preserving them on the internet rather than destroying them as monks do. She's also a fucking badass.
So a recent exchange about guest blogging for one another put us at a crossroads. The Hitch List is mostly prose, an archive of occasionally vapid and debauched experiences punctuated with general relationship musings and the occasional nervous breakdown. Hannah's blog shanks you in the ribs with a screwdriver, then hands you a poem to read during recovery. Guest blogging for one another would mean attempting to work in the other's medium, which terrified...uh, both of us.
So, instead: She's built a narrative poem tailor made for a space more familiar with paragraph-long sentences and strip club jokes. I've passed on a piece of fictional prose to her space in return and hope it doesn't collapse on its self. The piece she wrote it fantastic and I'm happy to have it here.
But, less ramble, more read. Hannah Miet's words:
Whiskey and Waldorf Salad, by Hannah Miet
My mother met my father through a personal ad
in The Village Voice.
It said, “I like jazz and Indian food.
I would like to start a family.”
They were both in their 40s and my mother says
they instantly became best friends.
My father says that it was love at first sight
without all the bullshit “romance.”
3 months before the wedding they fornicated on an island
off the coast of the former Yugoslavia.
My mother made the announcement of my birth
at the reception in a Chinese Restaurant in the West 70s
that is now a wine bar. She was wearing a blue dress and looked thin
but not skinny,
mostly, she looked happy.
My mother called me yesterday while I was forking
through a puddle of vegetables in mayonnaise
surrounded by two grapes and two walnuts.
I told her that the Waldorf isn’t all it’s cracked up to be
though it’s good for people watching
and you have to people watch very carefully
when you’re scanning the crowds of suits and tourists
for your date, who never shows, most likely due to work
or marital strife
or something equally
boring.
I tell her that if I had a personal
in the Voice, it would only say
“Please use correct grammar in text messages”
because that’s all I knew about wanting
or being wanted
and my mother said that I’ve always been too picky about the wrong things
and not picky enough about the right things and that my problem is that
I’m uninterested
in the calm after the storm.
I wanted to remind her that she ran awayto France for six years
and lived on a hippie commune in San Francisco where clothes were forbidden
and communicated through letters across borders, sealed with kisses and written
in full sentences with correct punctuation, no ebonics or emoticons, or lols
but my mouth was full of Waldorf salad and my date was calling on the other line
with a proper plea for mercy so I held my tongue and washed it down with the burn
that never hurts.
I won't say what I love about this piece because people should chew things uninfluenced, but yeah, she is very good. So good, in fact, she's got a book coming out. Miet's met the Kickstarter base goal needed to get one of her debut projects off the ground and into book form, and I encourage all to pass even a $1 to the cause. The book may be funded already...but just a few extra dollars could be the difference between something nice and something so fucking epic you have to hike it across Middle Earth and drop it in the fires of Mordor just to destroy it, that's how badass it is. THE FIRES OF FUCKING MORDOR PEOPLE.
Book burning was taken particularly seriously at Mordor State University.
See? That's SERIOUS. So please. Support Hannah by going to her blog and reading EVERYTHING, then click here: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/Hannahmiet/hello-absurd-world-a-book-of-5-minute-poems/comments
Many thanks to Hannah for sharing her world in this humble blog.
Is anyone else entertained by the bleeding entrails of another human being's emotional dignity?
I am.
Well. I mean, my own bleeding entrails aren't funny. To me. But they should be to, like, other people. Otherwise what would the point be? When I make a stiletto-ed, snot-dripping gazelle run down 7th Avenue at 3am, wailing like a menstrual raptor during hormone therapy while being chased by a lover driven to such madness by my estrogenic meltdown he can't figure out whether to offer consolation or knock me unconscious/jam me in a cab/pay the driver to drop my body somewhere in the Palisades, it isn't funny to me. At least at that moment. But I draw comfort once the dust settles that someone who bore witness to my public breakdown might have been able to turn to their drunk friend with a chuckle and say, "Did you just see that shit?"
ASIDE: I believe that no one does visual representations of "bleeding entrails of another human being's emotional dignity" better than Kiki Smith. Just look at how belligerent her art is.
I mean OH MY GOD buy a journal already.
Seriously. Kiki Smith. Google her. ANYWAY.
Point is, Politics Daily "Legal Analyst" Andrew Cohen may have allowed his own break-up pathos to become one of the most entertaining pieces of Loss of Emotional Dignity Pornography the interwebs have had in...well, say days, with a piece that went up a few days ago.
BACKSTORY: On the eve of his former love's nuptials to another man, Cohen "gifted" his ex with the traditional wedding present of a Batshit Backhanded Compliment Meltdown Column, appropriately published in a political web magazine. (Also, someone paid him to do this. Which means my diary must be worth at least $0.50 a word, or around $7000 dollars.)
Here's Cohen's original post:
The great love of my life marries today and I am not the groom. I had my chance, a few years ago, but did not realize until too late how fleeting my moment with her was meant to be. Whether it was my fault or hers, and, let's face it, it was probably mine, I will wonder always about the life I might have had with the most loving and loveable woman I have ever known. Sometimes, I finally now understand, love, even crazy love, is not enough. Sometimes, as the romance novelists know, timing is everything.
But today is not a day for remorse. It is not a day for lost causes. Today is a day for celebration. The woman I once promised to keep happy is happy. She tells me she is marrying a wonderful man, with a good heart, whom she believes I would have liked had we met in different circumstances. She lives where she wants to live. She has selected her life's path. All that is left for me to do is to wish her well and to hope that she has made the right choice; that she continues to find in him what she did not find in me. And I am sure he considers himself today the luckiest man on the face of the Earth.
The present I humbly send her today is this column; this public note, this irrevocable display of affection and support and gratitude; this worldly absolution from any guilt or sadness she felt between the time she said no to me and the time she said yes to him. No one ought to have to carry that with them into a marriage. I showered her with as much love as I could muster when we were together. I still love her and always will. So I am only too happy to offer my toast to her now, one more time, before she takes her vows.
I want to thank her, mostly, for rescuing me from hopelessness. When we met, back in the spring of 2005, I was nearly 40 and had been dating off and on for two years following an unexpected divorce. I had lost faith in relationships. I had given up on love. She arrived, unexpectedly, and showed me what was possible. She raised me up from the emotional dead. She drew out of me the poison of divorce and betrayal. Eleven years younger but already more mature than me, she was dazzling, brilliant, funny, and sweet; she both gave and taught me patience and devotion and sacrifice. No woman before or since ever made me feel as desired, needed, beloved, appreciated as she did. No one has yet made me want her more. Some men live their whole lives without this kind of love. At least I had it for one brief, shining moment.
I want to thank her for being so delightful with my son, who talks about her still, and to my parents, who couldn't believe their son's good fortune to have landed such a sweetheart. Until almost literally his dying day, my dad would ask me about her. Near the end, almost exactly two years ago, I did not have the heart to tell him that we had broken up. It gives me peace figuring that he died thinking she'd be in my life when he was gone. And in a way I suppose she is. Rarely a day goes by when something in my life -- the law, journalism, horses, celebrity gossip -- doesn't make me think of her or what she'd think.
I want to thank her for making me laugh, at her and myself, and for making me swoon whenever she walked into a room. I want to thank her for the advice she gave me, and for the soothing tone of her voice during times of trouble. I want to thank her for completely changing my outlook on life. Before I met her, as a single father, I never would have considered having another child. Although it took more time than it should have, I came to realize through her love and devotion that there would be nothing more I would rather do in the world than have a child with her. How many poor souls go their whole lives without the heart-string pull of such emotions?
I want to thank her for giving my life's dream contours and a calculus. I want to live on a farm one day, a farm filled with horses and wireless connections where I can write. And now, thanks to her, I know exactly what I want and need in a partner who might just want to get there, too. That's just another gift she gave me; the gift of knowing what is possible in a relationship; of refusing to settle for mediocrity where it counts, and of taking the chance when something inside tells you it could be love. I sound like a sap. I know. But it's no less true. No matter what my romantic future holds, I know there will be no retreat from the standards she has set. Like the song says, surely someone will one day dare to stand where she stood. I can't wait.
On her wedding day, I want to thank her for all those times she stuck up for me -- with her friends, with her family, with her work colleagues. It could not have been easy, explaining to all those cooler heads, why she was so devoted to an "old guy" who lived so far away. Yet she did it, even after she had decided that she would not throw down her lot with me. That's the sort of character I'd like to instill in my son. It's the sort that we think is all around us but actually is rare. It is courage and self-confidence and the ability to see right from wrong. She displayed it every day, right down to the end. Ours was a romance without rancor; a love affair that ended in peace, not war.
I want to thank her for being such an inspiration. She did not give in or sell out or become one of those poor women of a certain age in New York who have put their careers ahead of their lives. When we met, she was living in New York but was not ofNew York; transplanted from the West Coast, she had not allowed herself to be seduced entirely by the City's charms. She took from Manhattan, like so many other beautiful women do, but she never gave to it her heart and soul. She was always rooted even among the rootless of her age and time. She knew she would one day leave the City, and she did, on her own terms. I admire her for that. I respect her for that. And I love her for it.
It wasn't too long after we met that I began imagining what our wedding day would be like. My second, her first, I nonetheless pictured her not taking it too seriously, laughing off the little crises that always pop up. I pictured her stunning in her dress and with that smile that would melt me. I pictured her having a vodka and soda to ease her nerves. I pictured us laughing a lot. I pictured myself at the end of the aisle. It was not to be. I've known that for years. But that doesn't make the love any less real.
So at last my wedding toast today is sincere: I wish the deepest and most profound love of my life a happy life, a good life, one in which she gives to and gets from the loved ones in her world the hope and the passion and the comfort and the support she always and so magically gave to me.
Wow. Good work Andy. This is pure poetry. I mean it. Like a Nicholas Sparks letter. If that letter had been covered in razor blades and the envelope filled with Anthrax.
But even more enjoyable than Cohen's original column are the pieces it's inspiring in response, which you should also read. Enjoy. Highlights:
Epic. Anyway. I'm off to go stalk Facebook status updates to make sure none of my exes have done something to send me off the deep end, then disable both my ovaries and Internet to insure nothing like this ever has my byline on it.
Since this blog's been brooding harder than a Belle and Sebastian fan held hostage at a Jonas Brothers concert without his cardigan sweater, I thought I'd lighten things up a bit. Specifically with drunken fisticuffs, lesbians and a new "Reasons my Father F-ing Rocks," in which Daddy Dearest coins the phrase "gorilla snatch" (hint: that's in reference to his arch nemesis' labia). So, the first in a series of non-brooding posts: That Time I Got in a Fist Fight With a Latino Man on the Subway. (My second failure at riding the subway like a normal human being.)
Now, anyone who knows me understands I'd rather be bound, gagged and forced to listen to a vegan propaganda opera scored by sitars than voluntarily quote Chuck Palahniuk.
That being said: "How much can you know about yourself [if] you've never been in a fight." - Fight Club
With that quote in mind "Get in a Fight" made the original Hitch List because, despite my desire to avoid the hipster bandwagon (mainly because I get carsick from riding all the way in the back), I fundamentally agree with Palahniuk's philosophy there. A good full contact fight can do more to unlock the primal core of a repressed suburbanite than all the ayuasca at Burning Man...and I'm mildly curious as to whether my core is made of hot, liquid badass or limp angel-hair pasta.
ATTN. EDITORS: This press release embargoed until 2am or your 4th vodka/Redbull
While I have an advanced degree in shit-talking (from New Jersey U), I've never actually gotten in a physical fight, i.e. the kind where pieces of your body make contact with pieces of another person's body without the shared goal of orgasm. The closest I'd ever come before this post's incident was
A) The time some married drunk threatened to kick the ass of my boyfriend for cock-blocking his attempts to bed my best friend. I flew into an overprotective rage and threatened to "slit" his "fucking throat myself" while making belligerent hand gestures until wingman Ariel and two other friends pulled me off him. I have no idea why I said this, because I don't carry a knife appropriate for throat-slitting.
B) The time 10-Year-Old Me slapped my 7-Year-Old Sister in the face over the last Fruit Roll-Up. (She started it.) NOTE: It was one of those awesome rainbow flavors and therefore worth fighting for.
Despite the deeply introspective nature of both events, I learned nothing about myself during those encounters, except that the darkest parts of me are willing to hit a blood relative in the face over a rainbow-colored corn syrup carpet rolled in plastic and marketed to children during Nickelodeon's Doug.
My fight cherry was recently popped when I stepped onto a rickety Brooklyn-bound subway train with intent to see some hipster band play a late-night set with a friend. With just two other passengers in the car--a middle-aged woman reading The Fountainhead and a nebbishy 30something guy in a skinny tie--I happily plopped myself down on one of those L-shaped tetris-piece seats near the door. There, I commenced standard "Please Don't Talk to Me" protocol: iPod in, journal open, eyes down. Also, knees shut.
Two stops later the doors parted to reveal a bleary-eyed, balding, mustachioed Latino man (PS: This is not a Racist post. This isn't evan a Poor Little White Girl Victimized By A Demon Minority post. This is a Drunk Jaggoff Whose Race Is Relevant Because He Looked So Much Like An Oversized Cheech Marin It's Worth Mentioning post. Cool? Moving on.) reeking of tequila and swaying slightly on the platform. He waved a limp hand at some equally hammered pals, stepped into our car, examined the four dozen empty seats ready to cradle his drunk ass all the way to Brooklyn....then sat down right next to me.
Every woman knows what it's like to be leered at in a totally inappropriate way. It's a creeping, burning sensation that registers on some piece of skin facing the perpetrator, then slowly spreads across your consciousness like sexual harassment napalm. Doppel-Cheech Marin was an advanced leer-er...and his gaze was a tactical air strike on the right side of my body.
But I can handle a leer. What I cannot handle is a lime and salt-scented hand reaching into my peripheral vision and toward my be-legginged knee.
"Mami, tu estas bonita," he was slurring as the hand approached its target. I channeled Daniel-San and waxed-off the incoming set of digits, propelling them to one side with my forearm while vomiting expletives. Doppel-Cheech look perplexed.
"DON'T TOUCH ME, understand? No nos moleste? Leave me alone."
"Ehh....," Doppel-Cheech grunted, both hands up in surrender. I went back to the journal.
Just as I was getting my narrative back, a brown face and neck crept into sight from the right again, Cheech's nubby mushroom nose near-level with my eyes, hands creeping to my seat.
"I'M TELLING YOU TO LEAVE. ME. ALONE!" At this point, both of our fellow passengers were watching, but not saying a thing.
Doppel-Cheech got angry. "Mami, whasss it is your problem, eh?" I noticed as I silently glared back at him that one eye was wandering off on its own like the fat kid with ADD on a museum trip, further evidence that I attract life's congenital mishaps even more reliably than reality TV shows.
I was determined to stand my ground, lest the dick see he was scaring the shit out of me and gain some sort of situational foothold. "You are the problem, now PLEASE back off."
He did. For about 1 minute. Then the shit hit the fan.
I felt one of the wandering hands reach behind me toward my shoulder, causing me to spring out of the seat so fast I almost stepped out of my own shoes and into the metal stripper pole strap-hangers cling to during urban commutes. I was a banshee at this point, brandishing my tiny index finger like a switch-blade and screaming at him to back the fuck off. We were hurling through the tube toward Brooklyn at top speed, the sound of squealing wheels only emphasizing that I was in essentially trapped in a tin can trying to fend off a tequila-fueled sex demon with no way out.
Instead of backing off, Doppel-Cheech stood up, squared off and asked me why I was "such a fucking beetch."
NOW:
Thanks to years with Alex, a former all-state wrestler and devout MMA fan, I know how to successfully execute a d'arce choke, which looks like this:
Thanks to the immortal film Monster Squad, I also know how to do this:
And thanks to a year and a half living in Bushwick, Brooklyn, I actually OWN one of these...and it was in my purse at the time:
Yes, these are eye-gouging knives, made to look like kittens.
Did I utilize any of the above tools or techniques?
No. Of course not. Instead, I blacked out, probably squealed like a ferret dropped in a bathtub and remembered the one piece of advice Alex gave me when I announced I was moving to the big city alone: "Always surprise them with first blow and make sure it's devastating...you're small as fuck and that's your only hope unless you've got a gun." (Thanks, Alex.)
I remember the stubble on the underside of Doppel-Cheech's chin as he swaggered toward me. I remember cocking back my right wrist, fingers drawn in. And I remember stepping forward as fast as possible while driving the heel of my right palm up toward his chin as hard I possibly could. The impact of my hand clicked Cheech's jaw shut with a sound like ice being chewed, then snapped his head back until his eyes (at least the one not meandering off to Mordor or wherever the hell it was wandering) were at the ceiling. Cheech stumbled until the back of his knees hit the rim of his seat, the combination of now-halting train and terrified Irish girl sitting him down in the process.
I've no photographic evidence of the encounter, but I hired an extremely reliable police artist to sketch a rendering of the event. It looked something like this:
As the train stopped I hurled myself toward the doors, screaming at Cheech--both of his hands at his mouth while he moaned--to stay where he was and not to follow me. The doors opened. I ran out, passing Nebbishy 30something Man, whose hadn't said or done a thing the entire ride. "And FUCK YOU TOO."
Cheech didn't follow. The doors shut behind me and I was alone on the platform save for a few late-night commuters straggling toward the exit.
Having survived the whole shitshow, I did what any self-possessed woman with adrenaline coursing through her veins would: I burst into tears and called my mommy. Who didn't answer because she was watching American Fucking Idol.
It took me about 15 minutes to collect myself and figure out what to do next. I didn't know the subway car number, had no injuries, was unfamiliar with the section of Brooklyn I'd ejected myself at and generally wanted to pretend the entire thing never happened. So, instead of calling the cops, I headed back underground, got on a fresh train (after looking for a car with lots of people on it) and went and saw Beach House shoe-gaze their way indie-rock glory. My friend bought me a warm Blue Moon. I probably should have hit him in the face for that.
So. I don't know if the whole event technically counts as a fight. But it's as physical I've ever been while in a state of utter panic, so I'll count it.
Here's what I learned, Tyler Durden:
1. I need to begin learning Brazilian ju-jitsu. Like, immediately.
2. When finally faced with the opportunity to use it, I will forget about the MMA d'arce choke entirely.
3. Stubble leaves marks on the heel of your hand for 2-3 days.
4. Adrenaline makes me cry.
5. If you're nearly black-out drunk and all the odds are stacked against you, I just might be able to kick your ass.
Loath their statement, what they do, things undone in saturninity.
All that purposed silence.
One day I'll go renegade and fill each inch with words, letters fucking letters until the whole sky goes black. They'll ask why she burnt the sun but there'll be no way to describe it.
Somewhere there's a conversation going on without you. It's every word you dreamed but you were not invited. Phrases you've been spelling out are changing people's lives, lolling soft and hard on the palates of rogue speakers. I wish we could hear them but the accoustics here are bad.
Somewhere else a piece of you is hung up on a question. Check your neck--you're noosed, throat caught in that curve. They all end with inverted fishing hooks
maybe you didn't notice?
Dangling feet are doing panicked pointe solos on the dot. If the answer you've been waiting for fails to arrive in time, they kick the dot from under you and all translation ends. The neck shouldn't be so fragile it can be snapped by a query, but it is.
And here we dare not ask what barbed punctuation does to tongues or hearts.
Somewhere deeper still: a corner with a stool. The cruelest sit and stare there through milky cataracts, judging whom to give replies. "Do not linger long or you'll go blind."
Quick--someone left the crumbs of their resolution behind. I'll give you my share. You look so hungry and there's still hope for you, I think.
But leave us.
I'm resealing the envelope and leaving one edge open.
I'd rather bleed to death from paper cuts than endure a pageless silence.
I think I have to acknowledge something finally. My avoidance of it here has written me into a corner, made me into a character I cannot sustain. Right now it is, and recently has been, such a large part of my life that editing it out left me with swiss cheese story boards, gap-toothed puzzle pieces that will never fit together.
It’s something I’ve put into words only once from the safe distance of a fictional narrative, so I’m asking for leniency if I fail to articulate compellingly, or at least in a way that doesn’t end up reeking of every self-pitying “sick people” illumination I’ve read. If I fail, let this post be buried and replaced with jokes and extended metaphors, easily tagged tales of anecdotal insignificance...remember those when you see the pink crosshairs on your screen.
I’m sick. Diagnosed, filed and case numbered, body penned in the autoimmune/neurological/sorry-we-just-don’t-have-a-cure-for-you zoo. I etched the vocabulary to categorize it on the inside of my mouth years ago so I wouldn't forget, as if that were an issue. It reads like beat poetry in chant: Chronic. Progressive. Degenerative. Post-viral, cyclical, et al. Non-transmittable, thankfully. “Life-threatening” maybe at some point. Not tomorrow or the next day. The major symptoms are mostly managed. The little ones are dealt with daily in the most unobtrusive ways we can devise. Most of it blends into the scenery.
There's a picture of me drinking martinis with my mom in the backyard one summer, IV jammed in the hand not holding the glass. You notice the liquor before the saline; the bag's just another set piece, more laundry dangling on the clothes line. It's been this way 8 years, but the last two years have been different...the last two have been about time. Feeling like there’s not enough of it. Wondering what to do with it. Recognizing I force resolutions and timelines on people because my clock hands finger minutes differently.
Lately I feel reduced to numbers. Viral titers. Bacterial levels. Cell counts. Electrolyte balances. Blood pressures. Dosages. 1mg, 3 mg, 50mg. 1g twice daily, 2tsp once daily, two packets at night only. 500cc’s out? 1lt back in. 10 days of antibiotics, 21-day cycles, 36-page reports. Helvetica typeface calender dates pulled out for fresh appointments. Everything is numbers. It might be why I always try to make love with my words.
Parts of it have threaded so casually into the fabric of my life it’s like it is supposed to be there. Like how blood work records make me remember events which had nothing to do with sickness; my sterile paper print-outs trigger memories like photos albums. “My virals were _____ in August 2008...the month Alex and I went to Connecticut for our anniversary. It rained that day at the winery.” I smell the rain, oak barrels, grapes. Taste chocolate-cherry port, suck on phantom tannins. Then wonder what ever happened to that bottle we stashed away. A full, tactile memory of an unmarred weekend, fished out of the pool of experience by numbers baited on a barbed diagnosis code.
But parts of it I will not allow to assimilate. Hundreds of dollars of cosmetics paint over whatever can be; I blend grey flesh into a pink glow so healthy you’d think I was born pretty. I cover scars, herx reactions, IV bruises, any surface sign of abnormality, hiding them with specifically tailored clothing, scarves, oversized jewelry. I fuss with the pieces all night, check every reflective surface making sure the costume’s on right. This is war paint, this is armor. This is my choice to identify as anything but a patient.
I fuck like a whore in heat on my back, my ass, or folded in half, wrapped around the front of partners like a papoose, sometimes lowered down from above. I lap at them until their eyes roll back just so they’ll never turn me over, never take me from behind...never see the marks on my back and shoulders from where the meds make me break out in hives. I don't want to waste energy worrying if the've noticed, wondering what they think.
“I always forget you’re sick,” an ex-lover told me recently. “I’d never have known if you didn’t tell me.”
And I do tell. It’s no secret. Anyone in direct proximity knows. A choice few know what it really looks like. A smaller number help me live with it day to day. Usually I bury it and most days I can hide it; when I’m sickest, I retreat until I’m better. For people out of the inner circle of care, the retreating comes off as many things its not; for me, it is all about isolation. Self-imposed quarantine makes sure the normal things that comprise a life cannot be infected by the infection. If too many people see, it spreads. You cannot uninfect perception.
What’s odd is that I’ll talk about it freely if asked, to the extent that I know how. I’m sure I talk too much about it, sometimes. But I find it hard to write about. To me it’s not something readable. Too hard to make funny, too Lifetime TV. Lands with a thud on 20Something Bloggers. **NEW SUBJECT: Are you afraid you’re going to die young?** Mostly, though, it has a way of hijacking what I want to do when I write, which is to entertain, elucidate, verbally masturbate. Tell a good story. Examine how I feel emotionally, so I can stop thinking about what hurts physically. The rough content's carefully extrapolated, censored by the source.
But it is in many ways the root of this whole blog. Especially that one etched qualifier: “progressive.” It resonates more than “incurable,” nags more than “chronic,” is more vulgar than "degenerative." It is a one-word incantation that alters my sense of time, skews the scale on which everything must be balanced. The panicked need to collect experiences, to cram as much in as possible, to choose to feel emotions most people should protect themselves from just to have learned the whole spectrum in time...all of that lives here. This blog is, in its own way, a covert shrine to it, the place I watch the half of me that wants to settle down bare-knuckle brawl the part that that’s terrified it will miss something if I do.
Please don’t get me wrong. This is a brooding kind of post, cryptic, rambling, frustrated in this moment, out of remission, scared. I know I am lucky. I’m generally happy. Blessings: My degeneration is slow and can be hidden most of the time. It doesn’t keep me, at this point, from getting into experience most pieces of ordinary l need.
I no longer remember what the point of this post is. I guess I was tired of writing about everything except what’s on my mind, which lately has been this, and tired of focusing every choice I’ve made through a homogenized lens that doesn’t quite project the whole picture. Why do you do the shit you do? I'm not sure...but this is a factor.
This is a little bit closer to the whole picture.
Photos taken by Alex, during treatment session, February 2009.
Too monophobic to go it alone, too neurotic to take the plunge without understanding it first, and too human not to make mistakes while I try and put the puzzle together. Point blank, I'm not ready...yet.
