Tuesday, June 26, 2007

legs

I waited for the spider to get close to the bed
I killed him with a Vanity Fair-the one with Barack on the cover
Then I went downstairs, for what my legs hoped was the last time tonight,
and saw another one, one inch legs, creeping behind the tv
bashed that one with a New Yorker--(perhaps he was the more literate arachnid)
tried to push down the panic of being swarmed by their orphaned children in the night
thought fleetingly of pulling out all of the furniture from the walls to inspect, spray, and pillage whatever little village they are trying to set up in my home
but flesh said "nay"
the powerlessness and anger swept through me
leaving me panting on the stairs

Saturday, June 23, 2007

Adventures in chronic illness

Yesterday was bad and I kept pushing and pushing until I got to Harvard Square. I was nauseous from the bus ride and so I said screw it and caught a cab, got home, took my pills, drank a bunch of water and went into a coma from which only a very full bladder awakened me. Thought I might vomit a few times in the night but it didn't happen. The diarrhea started this morning and in between bouts I've been comatose.

Now I'm eating some bread, enjoying the breeze and sunshine from my tiny garret window, thinking about maybe this is how you feel when you are dying--as a writer, metaphor is my game. I feel poisoned sometimes, like there is something running through my body that is the antithesis of life who's sole reason for being is to pillage and destroy my normal life processes and I think this in a very non-melodramatic way as yesterday wore on and I'd gone through my checklist of medications, ungents, potions, reasons, drinking tons of water and taking the least stomach busting ibuprofen, and only half the diabetes medication because a whole one will make me sick on an empty stomach, and trying to remember if I'd eaten something that would result in feeling this way, and then giving a complex presentation on gift processing, and then leaning against me boss's doorway and looking so bad that she looked up and made me sit down, and she said " go home," but we had our first team lunch and I thought maybe it's just that I haven't eaten so we went to lunch after I've used my glucose meter just to check and see if its abnormally high blood sugar that was making me feel so crappy, but it was actually low--if I'm a diabetic it should be about 100 when I haven't eaten and 130 when I have but it was 70, in the normal range, so I ordered fish and vegetables--I love vegetables, I have such hope when I eat them that they will stay in and will distribute their nutritional value--but of course an hour after lunch they galloped through me like a heard of buffalo across the open plain, no natural obstacle, like small intestine cilli, in their path, so ok it was 3p and I was going home but there was a guy to interview and if I'd gone home he'd have to come in a 3rd time which seems ridiculous as I was already there so I sucked it up, always suckin' it up, good for the soul they say and did the interview--hire him immediately! I say--and then it was 5p and the nausea begins in earnest, but it's more than that, it is a deep malaise that makes my legs shake, it's the throbbing headache that seems like my brain is halving itself, blinking as it were, it's the vertigo that keeps my eyes slap dab on the horizon as the bus sways and the smells of a dozen people who wear cheap perfume with an alcohol base or aren't acquainted with soap or modern hygiene or who have had something so noxious for lunch that it's seeping out of their pores and wafting into my too sensitive smeller along with the usual odors of not-oft-cleaned public transportation and a city that sometimes seems as if it were busting at it's seams with human detrius and pigeon droppings...so withdrew a 1/3rd of what I have in the bank, got into the cab, strategically placed myself far away from the cab driver, who was doused in Drakkar Noir and garlic, kept my gaze on the horizon and prayed for newer shock absorbers and not too much traffic, Haitian radio, or false conversation. Of course there was 3 out of 4 but I'm grateful that the radio was off.

What is Goddess trying to tell me these days? I pushed through last weekend, which had so much magic, humanity, friendship and love about it that it was worth it. I pushed through yesterday and probably cost myself a few days of conciousness. One of things that I work hard on in therapy is my black and white thinking which is in direct contrast to my sense of magic, intuition, spirituality and intellect, but which seems to prevade, especially when I'm too spent to fight it. Cause and effect. This must be happening for a reason. Sometimes I think She is giving me this time so that I can write, and write with the biggest sense of appreciation for the human condition. Sometimes I think She's giving me this time because I lived so hard, so destructively, so self-hatingly for so long that She needs me to have black and white experiences, the highs and lows that happen simultaneously or in quick succession. I'm thinking particularly of last week's concert--I had to sit out the dress rehearsal because I was feeling so lousy but here we were in a church where Nelson Mandela came to speak, where we were recognizing people, very young people, who literally gave their lives in the fight against hatred, and seeing that anal, bitchy, white girl try to do that dance and then Nick very gently telling her "thanks for trying"...I just got up and danced. Like "David up and danced...David danced before the Lord...he danced before the Lord with all his might." That's what I did. And somewhere from the deep recesses, or maybe from that part of my brain that is crazy, or that reserve of some of the strongest and most well-survived ancestry, or just from the power of the moment, and the energy my friends were sending me, I stood up for the first time in a long time, for a whole concert, and when the moment came again, I danced before the Lord with all my might.

And maybe that was worth today's suffering.
And maybe one day soon I'll be able to parse it in much deeper and more sophisticated feelings than that.

And wouldn't I give quite a lot to be able to eat a green bean and dance the night away with the only negative repercussion being a lovely sheen of sweat and slightly sore gams the next day.

But maybe being able to dance when you really think you can't is the freakin' point already.