Too Good To Last

The problem of living a life full of pain and disaster is that it becomes commonplace. The soothingly familiar. Anything falling outside the pattern becomes an aberration and a watch clock can be set on it, waiting, waiting, for things that bring happiness and hope to turn into expected punishments and death.

I fight hard not to do that with you. When you fail to disappoint me and continue with your unerring support and care I imagine terrible deaths to come. I won’t lie to myself and say it is all entirely healthy: Your depression and thoughts of suicide may well be what opened me to you in the first place. They offered me a flaw in a different place. Where before I accepted emotional vacuity and occasional abuse both mental and physical, now I could have my unhappy ending in a different flavour.

The problem is that you have changed me. Knowing you and allowing you to love me has made it impossible not to expect that in people. Never again will I be able to accept a self-flaggellating life. So the rhythm of tragedy by death that I imagined for myself is broken. The weakness of such logic is revealed.

Good things might not last. As it has been with you, they might get better and better.

Where am I: Chronic Pain

Since I have slept most of the weekend I thought I would go out to get fruit. So I don’t know if it was that, the pills I am on for the chronic pain in my back or just too much sleep. But I am having a fracture with reality.

I woke up a few hours ago with amnesia. I did not know who I was, where I was or what I was supposed to be doing. It lasted for about five minutes. Not long enough to matter.

But then, when I stepped outside I felt like I was glowing. Like there was light being thrown off of me that made other people uncomfortable. At the store I had to rest for a moment when the pain in my back took my breath away. That was when I burned brightest.

I have this terrible feeling that this is it. That this pain is what will be part of my life because I have had so long to know it was coming. Just for going out, even with the pills, it is hard to not just think about pain. I can’t sit, write or use my right arm with out screams of protest from the nerves in my spine.

It has a rhythm, the pain. The same as my heartbeat. If I don’t breath and just listen it has a hypnotizing effect.

Eicophobia

I am not a fearful person?
Mostly friends ask me if I thought through what I was doing because it seemed risky to them. I answer yes - I’ll go anywhere alone at night in any country, repel cliffs without a proper harness, ride a bicycle hundreds of miles with no helmet or light and dart through traffic using only my peripheral vision.

How surprising and messy it is then that I am the most fear-filled person of all.

Because I am persistently afraid of my home. Not of houses or your home.
Mine.
The home I live in.

It is not something I think about. I did not, riding the subway home this evening think, OH FUCK NOT HOME. Rather, I was looking forward to returning to some work and eating some frozen yogurt (vanilla).

I wish it was something I thought.

I push through my front door and put on my indoor flip-flop shoes. Slowly the burning ache in my back, gone for most of the evening, hums awake. I put away groceries. My eyes and temples begin to sink and grow with my heartbeat. I boil a kettle for tea and put away dishes. I have to stop for a minute and work hard to find a full breath.

What, I thought, do I do. Where, I wonder, do I go. Because anywhere I go, if I stay there long enough, becomes home.

And then I remember living in my car long ago as if it is some type of answer and not a cause.

Pretending to Get Help

I can’t write this yet.

But I can write this.

I have had a anxiety-free day…so calm and relaxed. No physical pains, slow breathing. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the 1mg of clonazepam that I took last night. It is because I am healed.

I think I’m drinking soap.

I am learning about hockey.

Pretty soon there will be no more bathing.

I’ve already been cut down to showers. Sometimes I go and sit in the tiny freezing moldy tub, lie back and imagine.

Soon, like now, I have no more anxiety medication. And I can feel it leaving me. I could go get other things that would help me more and in better ways but I cannot do that. Like how I cannot take a bath. The tub is there but it is too awful there to actually bathe. I have the prescription on my lap right now but it is too terrible for me to fill it. But I can sit back on my daybed and imagine being well.

Disordered Groceries

Grocery shopping is always something we do. I miss that. Our various disorders demanded that, while others dined out fashionably, we had already picked slowly through the grocery store so we could prepare food at home. I revel in grocery shopping. My friends haphazardously get groceries when they think of it and buy random packages that catch their eye. Then they put it all away and forget about it for weeks and months. Not me. For me it is a science. Nothing ever ever ever wasted. Of course I know how much it will be and have the money out for the cashier before she can tell me the total.

And I have just moved across town.

So it means ALL NEW GROCERY STORES. And I have, in short order, found my grocery heaven: a store UNDER CONSTRUCTION.

Inside this store is mayhem. Empty freezers stand at wrong tight angles to carts of mixed nuts. The produce is hidden in the back of the store behind tarps so you can’t find it. The ceiling tiles are missing at random intervals, revealing dark cavernous heights. It is like no grocery store I’ve ever been in. Random and challenging my organization skills. And best of all…there are no people.

Today it was empty save for two (I am assuming) Jewish men searching for kosher salt. The staff, in the midst of this chaos and freed of the annoyance of customers depleting their shelves, are giddy. The Jews ask a man in an apron about the salt and he screams NANCY HONEY DID WE EVEN PUT THE KOSHER SALT OUT?

Finally, after humming pleasantly to myself (a song I have been listening to over and over) in the empty isles for far too long, I approach the bored cashier. I stare up at the line of flickering naked fluorescent bulbs just above her and think about seizures. Then I wonder, why am I the only grocery shopper who loves it here?

Continuities

Think back to the times when your feet tingled and all your muscles tensed from cold.

That is how it is where I am living. It is probably my white trash inheritance but I adore, I worship, my electric fireplace. I find it more beautiful than any real fire I have seen. So predictable and, above all, so dustfree clean.

For some reason, and for the first time in my life, my hands are disintegrating. Disappearing inside a blistering, peeling, itchy and cracked carapace. It started on my right (unringed) ring finger but is, despite my best efforts, spreading. I always had so much pride in my hands and especially my long fingers. So delicate and able. Now they defy me.

I am supposed to go to a birthday party but I won’t.
Met some people today who thought I was there age but I am not.
My tiny dog is reacting to me quite differently - with more affection and warmth - which is yet more proof towards shorting out the repetitious belief that I can never change when perhaps I already have.

Smacked in the head

Yesterday and today I woke up feeling very calm. I felt I had turned a corner in understanding my anxiety. The things that were plagues earlier in the week seemed so manageable.

Then I went to therapy and spoke at length about my mother. Analyze, as I love to do, her casual email to me from last week. It was extremely helpful because I got a new perspective on many things.

But, and I am no longer surprised, the aftermath of this is exhaustion and that physical pain. My jaw and chest ache. I can’t get a full breath. Not at all.

I made food and ate. During this process my anxiety spiraled upwards. I tried to stop myself and ask why. Was it because I always had to race to eat food because my stepfather resented how much it cost to feed me. Was it because I had to hurry up and eat and clean everything up because eating was just a wasteful mess making activity. Was it because I felt guilty for wasting food on myself because it is expensive to eat and I need to save all my money because eventually that is all anyone has.

All these things. More I couldn’t even track. The aftermath of eating in the glow of thinking about my mother is like the aftermath of a fight where someone 50% bigger than you smacks you in the head. You can get up and walk away but you hurt all over inside and out for hours following it.

The difference is this time I know I don’t deserve it and I am going to try to make the way I feel about it more important than the way I think I should feel.

Wait to Weight

Here’s a secret: my father isn’t dead. He is waiting for me. He is a presence I carry around with me and when something good or bad happens he sees. I can’t see what he looks like. I can’t hear him. But he is always around, on my periphery.

He is waiting for me. He has been waiting and waiting.

My mother is Jennifer Connely’s nose and cheeks and Barbara Hershey’s hands and chin.
She is pieces of actresses from horror movies I find comforting to watch and think about.

He still waits. He told me to wait for him. He would never let me go. No matter what. And so I wait too. We wait together in orbit of each other, close but not seeing.

I can’t make us stop waiting. I can’t disassemble my Hollywood mother. But I can do other things.

I can run every day. I can stay thin enough to see all the ribs join my sternum. I can excise all the variety and excitement out of life and eat, drink and fold in exactly the same ways for a decade.

When the wait is over, when my mother is an average woman. When.