Month: October 2019

Believing in someone:

Enjoying them. Liking their ways. Relishing the reliable and savouring surprise, when it comes. Feeling spongey and soft about the things they do for you. Feeling just as sentimental for acts that are of personal impertinence.

Blooming a wispy shade of annoyance at their small protuberances of habit, those that impinge on your own twitches, and carrying on without issue, still. Choosing to abstain from quarrel when their movements are not just as yours might be. Recognizing opportunity for self-reflection in the placid waters of their character. Coming around to the idiosyncratic; appropriating it, furtively, for your own flip book memory.

Sharing the fractal aftershocks of whatever pain rattles deep to their faults, clinking and calling out in tinny echoes on the way down. Knowing you can’t heal much but not letting that scare you; displacing the fantasy of panaceal ability to allow for empathy. Providing in proprietary fashion, be it with comfort or patience or distance. Reserving predictive judgement when their senses fail them, again. More than anything, maintaining certainty that the winds will shift, that their lightness isn’t lost to shifting tides, not for good. And when wheat-coloured sentiments sweep back over aged plains: doing your part for the earth, which waits to be tilled by tenderness.

But also. Showing no signs of fear when wracked with it, for them, for their purpose and contentment and worth and struggles. Sometimes plunging your heart to anchor a ship whose pitching is churning up acid. Standing ground when the panic blisters the barricades you built out yourself. Treading the blanched sidewalk between the lawn of bitten weeds and beetle shells and then the somber asphalt highway, hot with friction and exhaust. Creating from air, as trees, the sustenance to go on without love lost or faith forgone even when every root of your own is bone-dry. Seeing sanity as something that must be passed up and back and forth always, shared continually. Knowing when to wait your turn.

Then seeing afresh the face that implored and has waited and now offers in kind. It’s funny how belief takes its time to uncrush you. Wiring up the emotional billboard to the city supply and displaying what you feel. Morse-coding in tea lights scattered around the house that you will not stop loving, please let’s not add that doubt to the receipts. Relying. Trusting. Thanking. Going on. The accordion of it breathes and there’s air at the blood cells, there’s goodness restored, there’s hope again renewed.

I do things I do not want to do. Tug at chains attached to vessels out of sight, preying behind peach fuzz fog. Cargos of delayed onset trauma, graffitied epithets in neon green tacked all up and down the corrugated faces. My arms are strong, I believe as I pull, sweat pleasantly seeping with the efforts, endorphins blooming up in the foam like overturned seaglass, transparent but softened. No symptoms for miles until mist splits at the fall of some atmospheric axe and I catch sight of the ghost ship leaking in.

I do things that feel like reward then feel like sneaking then feel like guilt. My sunken heels bruise the clay far beneath. To savour is to place a limitation on pleasure but I often scrap the bookends just to enjoy it all the more, as if time and consequence bend both at my intention to extend goodness just for myself, for no other purpose than to keep the dopamine slick as oil cast over water. Surface level hedonism in its most reductive form.

And for all the indulgence braided with self-scorn, I do wonder: can my tendencies get any more banal. Like the swilled tenderness of looking out over the ocean, like photographing a sunset on a fucking phone. Spit me out as the wine offered as blood and the bread as flesh and go find something of substance to consume below board. Treat whatever else as the spoil, the furtive escapist headrush taken in silence at the gate just outside the building. Nothing reliable for me to say as both the criminal and the punisher, one pocket filled with uppers and the other loaded with leaden repercussion. I am better off scattered to sand upon which the barges will inevitably run ground. Every day I wear my feet to bloodless sludge at the mortar of impulse. Happiness as single photons raining erratically through coastal grey. Seagulls hack endlessly overhead.

Two sea-sawing actions, the consequences of which I have been wracked for as long as I can remember: chasing the dragon of whatever small opportunistic pleasure is available to me, and regretting the consumption of it. Calories. Ethanol. Self-indulgent sorrow, and then daydreams. Someone tell me to get a better hobby. I keep going after these razor-edged ideals thinking they’ll provide some splendour and even when they do, what they offer each is never enough to satiate the longing that lingers/languishes in my brain. Neural tissue is difficult to appraise as part of one’s body – compared to muscle, which fatigues, or flesh, which scars – and I despise whatever electrical frizzling of my physiology makes me reach out for second helpings of no-good charge. I can’t control myself around certain whims. I do things that I regret for the sake of momentary movements on a needle measuring units I can’t read. I feel like I’ll never ghost into the body of the pure and demure person I want to be, for at every shoreline is the next best disaster on which I will always choose to imbibe.

He says to me, with one eye ready to rupture – literally; his retina has detached once again and he describes his field of vision as a 16:9 shrouded by a precipitant grey curtain of nothing – in his paternally scolding tone, gentle though it is, “and so tell me. Since we last spoke, did you go get your iron checked?”

Can never lie. Can’t make excuses, either. I have not done what I’d promised to do, and this disappoints him. Despite the triviality of my predicament (which I’d never try to explain outright, as there’s no back pedalling on anything you’ve mentioned to a parent), and the ironic disparity between the columns of health on which we both rest in our gurneys, he chides me. It’s in my best interest to look after myself, he says. Reminding me always of the thinness of human paper; our scrolls could unravel well below our knees, or we would be blessedly scrawled upon by inky import, but we are all of us susceptible to dog-earing, to little irreparable tears if pulled at too quick. My known weak spot is my hemoglobin and, again, I see that parameter as a negligible one, but to my dad it’s the fulcrum entire. Or at least it’s a touchstone, and the only one the two of us can reference without shame (because never could we converse about stranger matters, the barometers that record shifts of mental winds). I tell him, tomorrow, I’ll do it, sure. I believe myself when I say it. The clinic is just past a coffee shop and that sweetens the deal in the pallid immortal brain I possess. As if the sun has to rise just peachy enough for me to draw blood, to make it worth the hassle of waiting at the clinic for a requisition, and then further finding the lab that will allow me to eat at all in the sixteen hours prior to testing. All the while I’m on the phone with him, thinking of his eyesight, the cancelled trip to Portugal which he’d been planning and looking forward to for months. I’d hoped to offer him suggestions of cliffs from which to gaze seaward, aged wine to drink in thoughtful moments, and instead I’m hearing his exhausted recount of procedure.

If they gas his eye tomorrow (don’t ask me what this means in medical terms) he can’t drive for three months. He can’t traverse elevation grades for that will cause the injected bubble behind his retina to expand or collapse and it hurts like all hell. He’s confined to his newish apartment which has been decked with the furniture of our old family house but I know can never provide the comfort that he needs, times like this. He’ll have to lie on his stomach to sleep with his head just a little off kilter for the pressure in his skull. His friends must be hailed like taxis when he needs groceries or a ride to the medical offices at the mall. Not sure what meals will be like for him. Want to cry at the idea of phone-ordered pizza or beef and broccoli noodles every night, while his cherished Paderno pans sit cold as granite behind plywood cupboards.

For all of this, he’s cheery, though he has choice words for the doctor that dawdled on his diagnosis. He says once he hangs up our phone call he’ll see if he can’t finish the movie on Netflix he started three nights ago. He tells me with excitement of the “near-meat” product he bought at the organic market on the block over from his place, how he was able to finesse it into a sauce for pasta and it hits the spot okay and he wouldn’t mind if that’s all he can muster reheating after his surgery tomorrow. For an instant I remember the bolognese he’d make for lasagna and how he would call me over, equally clandestine and proud, to implicate me in the addition of heavy cream to the sauces, whispering that I not tell my mother about the secret butterfat. The wonderful things he can do for one’s soul, however likely to pierce or rip or shred. Fortification through calories and through humble, tartan-splashed panache.

I tell him what I’m eating for dinner because he asks. We talk a little about the Volvo station wagon we might inherit. Idle catch-up for two people far too distant for the love between. Then a return to the tomorrow, the impending, as I struggle to find the placations to apply for his malaise. What do I say to him – hope your day goes good? I recognize my frailty as a well-wisher but he catches me before my own falter, as he would have when I was small, and reminds me that this is okay. This will be manageable. It’s his certainty on this that holds me aloft inches from sandpaper pavement. “I saw this guy at the hospital today,” he begins. “He had just had a stroke. His one hand was all gnarled and he walked with a limp.” So glad you’re not worse off. Can’t imagine not having you sentient; where would I go to learn the things that make me better. “And I knew when I saw him that that guy would trade places with me in a second.” Want to ball up and scrap-bin the page of me for his insight. Profundity I wish I could have inherited. For all the moping I’ve done in my silly life, for the total laziness of my privilege, there’s still a person here that believes I’m cogent enough to understand his lessons, and kind enough to hope that I’ll implement them.

We’ll aim to go on a make-up trip in the spring, we decide: New York, when things start to look green again. He’s long wanted to see a Broadway show, and I know that no matter his vision he’ll have the ears to catch harmonies that break hearts, rouse depressives from their self-mortared caves. Plan for it. Reaffirm that yes okay, I’ll actually go get my iron checked tomorrow. It’s a matter of living, is what he implies – not exactly life or death, but making beautiful the roll of paper you get. Even if it comes to you pockmarked or already scribbled on. I remember that he never wanted kids until he decided it might be selfish not to, and if I were to exist as the child of any other, I’d agree – how dare he conceal this wisdom from me, I a lowly, anemic, feeling-burdened girl, and he the person with limbs outstretched to turn my head to all the goodness in the world, regardless of how little of it I can see.

Do you like yourself? Or, rather, do you hold yourself, let’s say as an out-of-body person with hidden thoughts but demonstrable behaviour, in good regard? Would you want to sit across from yourself on the bus, both of you riding into work as the late February sun splashes in a sweet but unremarkable way out across the water, the view of which one of you can see but maybe the other can’t, maybe one is instead plugged between pillowcase headphones or soaking in idle time quiet as moss? Would you want to be in your own presence for a stumbled moment: just long enough to notice an interesting wrinkle or to question a choice of apparel? Could you go as far as to have a conversation? Would the voice of you reaching out into your space have something to say, something that would make you think for a little bit more than you expected you would, or do you think it’d be more like keeping the trees dry in a rainstorm? Would you have anything to say at all? Would you want to befriend yourself in a happenstance way where the two of you like leaves flutter forth from opposite ends of the park just to land in the lap of a reading babysitter, who has spans of time to allow pleasantries to be exchanged, companionships to be conspired? Swinging interlaced hands at the end of the afternoon. Maybe it would be harder, somewhat jagged at the seams where you and yourself are conjoined; but with benevolence and patience could you find the sewing kit to knick the threads at these places, to make decided stitches and knots at your leisure, as the good grace of time plays itself to mute and each of you grows fond of either canted reflection. Perhaps not, though, not ever. You might hate the sores on your body where they so obviously bleed through the cotton, hate the boorish banter you project in splintered verse. You might see yourself anew and sadistically so, no glass panel to bewitch your brain which houses lenses on every floor, and want in the end in equal quantities to vandalize the figure before you, and to hide from it. Maybe that’s why you’re outside of yourself in the first place: to maim, to reject. Phantoms leering at the portraits in the hall.

Do you like yourself, as you are? If you do, would one of yourself be so kind as to elucidate the method.