Time Is Pretty Cool When It Isn't Forcing You to Exist Continuously Through Another Terrible January

This is my middle-of-the-night stream-of-consciousness post that I am not going to allow myself to delete later. It's a good exercise. It loosens up the blogging fingers and let's me freak out a little about something not related to my imminent death.


This is me in the tub with my kitty, Oskar, who is ridiculous and likes to be
extremely close to, but not actually in, hot water.

My death is not actually imminent, but it's January right now, and January is when I am pretty sure that my death is imminent anyway. I am sure that I will get cancer again and that my mid-winter weight gain is a symptom of a thyroid condition related to that imaginary cancer, and then I watch a documentary about breast cancer and pink-washing, and I end up walking around the apartment feeling myself up repeatedly and wondering if that spot I keep poking is going to be the cause of my imminent demise or if I should just cut back on my caffeine intake.

I like the way caffeine is spelled. I always say it caff-ay-inn-ay as I type it out.

That's when the visual migraine thing I sometimes get kicks in, and the whole world starts to sparkle in blinding patches like it's all turning into a disco ball, and I worry that it's actually a sign of a brain tumour or probably a stroke, because the visual migraine is usually accompanied by some facial numbness, and I realize that I haven't showered in a day-and-a-half, and, if I am going to end up in an emergency room with a stroke, I want to look and smell better while I do it, so I get into the shower and don't realize until half way through that I am possibly the dumbest person having a stroke ever, so I get out of the shower and drip all over the floor so that I can inspect my face for asymmetrical drooping, and, being that there isn't any, I decide that I'm not having a stroke and finish my shower, after which I take some Benadryl and have a long, therapeutic nap.


This is what crap I looked like before that shower.

The good news is that I'm not dying! The bad news is that I could be, but so could we all. Oh, January. I cannot quit you, at least as long as time keeps functioning the way it does.

Yesterday afternoon, during one of my therapeutic naps, I had this terribly involved dream about smoking pot, those outdoor hamburger figurines from 1970s McDonalds, baby tigers, and the nature of time. It was fantastic. In my dream, time only seemed to function in a linear fashion for those who didn't understand it, but, once you began to understand the true nature of time, it would function more in accordance with its true nature in loops and pockets and waves, and it all resulted in me getting really stoned by accident after having been mislead by a plastic, anthropomorphic garden hamburger in Alabama, and I ended up cuddling baby tigers soaked in orange juice with my aunt, who, not understanding the true nature of time, disapproved of the fact that they were being kept in giant hamster exercise balls. Poor baby tigers. They were sticky.

Time is pretty cool when it isn't forcing you to exist continuously through another terrible January filled with death anxiety.

Somehow, this is all making me think of Edenland. Hello, Edenland! I hope you are having a fine evening, or morning, or whatever time of day you are having over there in Australia.

The End.

I Am Not Allowed Detachment Now

For the last two days, I have had a tightness in my chest. I'm distracted. I'm depressed with a twist of unplaced worry.



I thought this was my usual fall weirdness, the kind I feel every year that translates the skittering of leaves outside as a death knell for all that is well and good in the world. Something about that self-diagnosis didn't sit right, though, and then the inside of my mouth began to ache.

The inside of my mouth nags at me when I am feeling some kind of non-physical pain to which I am not paying the proper attention. I am the local queen of denial around these parts. I often won't notice that something is up with me until my anxiety has inflicted me with numbness in my extremities, apocalyptic dreams, and painful outbreaks.

It's not like the reason for my anxiety was hiding under any rocks. I am travelling to my hometown over the weekend to spend time with family and attend my grandfather's memorial service. He died, he's dead, and I obviously have feelings about that which I am not expressing. I know this, because the roof of my mouth just ahead of my throat is raw and red.

This used to happen to my throat at church every Sunday when we sang hymns. Hymns fester the sorrow out of me, and there will be more than a few of them this weekend. Goddamn.

I used to be able to avoid everything all the time by chasing down the bottoms of pint glasses, but now that I can't do that anymore, my body won't let me get away with the avoidance. It sent me a rash of canker sores when he died. They bloomed into broad, white heads that bled when I sucked at them in my sleep.

I am not allowed detachment now, if my actual, flesh-and-blood mouth has anything to say about it. Goddamn.

It's Done.

I knew it wouldn't be long, and now it's done. My grandfather passed away yesterday morning at the age of 93 just three weeks shy of his 70th wedding anniversary. My grandmother was having a clear day, and she was able to sit with him through it.

Thank you to every single one of you here and elsewhere who have said kind things to me over the last few days since I mentioned the beginning of this thing a few days ago. It's been a strange limbo to sit in while I have waited for a family member to pass on three hundred miles away, and you helped to keep me present and connected.

I didn't mention it yesterday, because I didn't have words for it yet. My heart didn't get it yet. I still don't have words, and my heart feels like it is waiting for the other shoe to fall. I don't think either of these things will sort themselves out until I experience proof of his absence.

All I have right now is this: I love you, grandpa, and I'm glad that you are free.

My Grandfather, Impossibly

This is my grandfather:



I was riding home from my shoe sales job in a cab, wondering how in the hell my cab driver had managed to get the car so damned humid with his stale breath if people were opening and closing its doors all the time, when I got a call from my mother. Her voice was shaky, and I knew immediately that it was about my grandfather.

He's been fairing less and less well as dementia has taken a hold of him. It doesn't just steal your memories, it slowly steals your body's ability to function, too, and we knew that soon it would literally steal his heartbeat or his breath. Now it appears that it is doing just that.

"This feels sad," my mother said, "but it isn't really. He wants this. He told us a month ago that he was ready for it to be over," and then later in our conversation, a conversation that was only fifteen minutes ago, she said, "We want this to be a celebration of life. He's had a long life. He's had a productive and good life."

And he has. He was at different times a farmer, a furnace repair man, a grocery store owner, and an insurance salesman. He had what we called his shop in a building next to the house. It was a garage with stone walls and a hard-packed earth floor. I used to sneak in when no one was around and run my hands over his tools and the wooden workbench that crossed the length of the back wall. The wooden handles felt soft even under my young hands after so many years of use. Some of the tools had been handmade my his forefathers in Russia and had no English names to describe them.

He was a quiet man who was shy around me, but one afternoon, when he caught me hiding in the shadow by the door, I asked him to show me his things. He went from piece to piece telling me the names of them, picking each one up and putting it down with that small velvet sound only grey, old wood above a dank earth floor can make. That's a sound most of us will never hear now. I hold it in my head, though, and replay it for myself.

He ushered me out of the shop once we reached the last tool at the end of the table, and I promised myself that I would remember the careful crescent moons that were his dry nails at the ends of his fingers. I haven't forgotten those, either.

Right at this very moment, my mother and her brothers are gathering around my grandfather three hours north of here in the home where he lives now. My grandmother is living on another floor of that same home, succumbing to her own dementia. She might not understand this tonight. I kind of hope that she doesn't.

It's so strange to think that only ten months ago, they had their own apartment together, and that she was tying his shoes for him, which he had just stopped being able to do on his own.



My mother says that his hands and feet were suddenly very warm, and then his breathing changed, which are signs that a person is right at the very end, but it all seems so impossible.

The man whose archaic camera flashbulbs would pop and send shards of glass into the carpet, the man who would chuckle under his breath and hoist his pants with his thumbs after I hugged him, the man who left his pillows smelling like Old Spice where I would bury my face after their visit: this ends. Doesn't that seem impossible? It seems impossible.

While I fumbled with money to give the cab driver, I was telling my mother to give my grandfather one more kiss from me, and it seemed all wrong to be in a funky cab handling money while sending my last bit of love off to my dying grandfather while hearing the waver in my mother's voice and realizing that I was listening to a daughter losing her father.

I felt like the world had gone cubist, all sharp and conflicting angles, and I realized that it's in cases like this when I wish all things were not possible.

----------------------------

PS. He's not gone yet. He's going, but he's not gone. These things happen slowly sometimes. I'm just glad he's got my family with him.

The Girl Who Couldn't Leave

One time, maybe it was fifteen years ago, I went away to a commune of sorts for ten days with a friend of mine. We were going there to do a ten-day brown rice fast in a small forest on the edge of a lake. There was no real reason for the fast. She was always trying to fix her heart with her body, and I had nothing better to do.



I was living up in my head like a hot air balloon in those days. I floated around above myself, my body a string. I could barely hear or see. It was as a dream. Everything sifted through my fingers and nothing was left. I had a lot of time on my hands and no obligations. I felt terrible.

The place was clothing optional. A man gardened naked while three young women lay out naked on a scrubby lawn that first afternoon, and I studied the grass with the curiosity of an alien botanist. I hung around for two days amidst what seemed like a profusion of nipples before I realized that it was my plaid shirt and jeans that were making me feel awkward. I took them off. I didn't wear clothes again for over a week.

The fast was one with an easy enough beginning. We were to eat short grain brown rice and nothing else. We added no salt or spices, and the only flavouring came from the well water we hauled across the property to cook it. The rice had to be chewed until it was like milk in our mouths, which we did dutifully, slowly chewing our way through one or two bowls a day. It kept us hungry but continually engaged with food, so our starvation remained somewhat manageable.

On the first day, the rice tasted bland, and we poked at its sticky texture without much enthusiasm. On the second day it tasted sweeter, but it fell short of inspirational. I dreamed about buttered toast. On the third day, the flavour had grown legs, but we were largely dissatisfied, suffering hunger pangs and sharp headaches. My friend sobbed on a cot in the main cabin, sure that she would remain one of the great unloved for the length of her days. On the fourth day, our rice was suddenly so full of texture and flavour that we checked our pot for signs of any outside doctoring. Plain rice, it turns out, can be a delight to a palate unsullied by anything but more rice for over eighty hours.

We wanted to keep track of our gastrointestinal adventure's physical effects, so, with an outhouse as our only plumbing alternative, we took to shitting on the forest floor in order to properly document our scat, and it was worth documenting. Interesting things happen to your body when you go on an extended fast, and your shit lays it all out in living colour. On the fourth day, we pulled it apart with sticks to find that it was the white of rice chewed into milk all the way through.

The fasting and mid-summer heat brought out a sickly slick of oil and sweat, and it occurred to us that we had not had a proper bath in all of those four days. We decided to use the sauna by the lake, which was the community's answer to showering. In our weakened state, we couldn't handle the heat for very long, though. After spending only about five or ten minutes letting the grime of naked living drip from us, we gave each other a quick rub-down with some biodegradable dish soap we had found in the main cabin.

"How do we rinse off?" I asked.

"We run off the end of the dock," she said.

I was afraid of of the chilly water, and I briefly contemplated living out the next six days inside that film of soap, but it was stinging my eyes, so I followed her heavy feet pounding down the boards to the end of the dock. She splashed through the surface, her skin moon grey in the evening light, and she shot straight up laughing. Water sprayed from her lips while she yelled out Oh ho ho!

I hesitated.

"Come on!"

I ran the length of the dock, but I stopped short with my toes gripped over the end of the last board. I breathed in and watched the cool air stipple the skin on my forearms for a moment before I heaved the best leap I could off that last few inches of wood. I crashed through the surface and sank.

It took me a moment to realize that my heart had stopped with the shock of cold. Silent and calm and wide awake with my eyes open, I sunk through the brown lake water. I watched the flush of silt sparkle up through the last rays while my body settled downward. Cold water flushed out the last of the heat in the well of my armpits.

Everything was beautiful and everything was far away while my heart remained still inside my chest. A switch had been flipped, and none of it was mine anymore. I knew that I was going to leave myself at the bottom of that lake. Life was the one infinite point upon which my consciousness had balanced. My body was an afterthought falling away.

From a distance, there was splashing and yelling, and I vaguely wondered what the matter was until she was suddenly right on top of me with her fingers in my hair, and she was screaming Jump! Jump up! Her fingernails scratched my shoulder. I supposed that I had to jump up, then. I had no desire to leave, but there was such a terrible panic above me, and I had to attend to it. It was clear to me that one way or the other, someone was going to haul me out.

That sounds so dispassionate now, so divorced from feeling, but it wasn't. I was just so entirely peaceful about my situation. At the time, it felt as though my heart were a mechanical fist from which I had been freed, and in that tipping point between here and there, I had been right in the middle of being alive. I had been in the lap of it, but now she was pulling at my hair, and it was take or be taken, so I gathered all I had left into my legs and pushed, at first with my ankles from a cross-legged position, and then with my feet, until my face broke the surface, and I pulled in air. I gasped at it. I swallowed it into my stomach like a panicked fish, and it hurt. It pulled at the inside of me like an atrophied muscle, and I regretted drawing it in. The air was an external object that forced my body to hum, and I threw up water. Bits of bile skimmed the surface.

I wanted to fall again into the loudness of the lake and the stillness without my heart, but there was no safe way back. I couldn't walk in again and enter it the same way I had come, and so I had to walk out of the water. I stood on the strip of beach until the night air had dried my skin, and then I hid in the tent with my head on a pillow cobbled together out of the clothing I no longer wore.

She lay down next to me in the tent and said I'm glad you didn't drown. I pretended to sleep and counted the rocks that pushed up along my spine.

I'd had a near death experience at nine, I had nearly drowned at ten, and now I had walked away again through very little will of my own. It felt neither relieving nor miraculous. It was suffocating, this life that continued to close in around me. It was claustrophobic.

I was the girl who couldn't leave.