Category: sathead

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fistula

I’m driving a station wagon filled with all of my worldly possessions covered over with white sheets. I’m in an unfamiliar town and turn off the road to pull into a gas station but stop when I realize that the driveway I’m pulling into is only for the mechanic and is blocked off from the fueling area. I can’t see how to get there.

We’re staying in a ramshackle motel or inn and leave the room for breakfast. When we return two ladies are cleaning the room and have packed up all of our stuff. I go past them to the bathroom. I’m trying to keep everything orderly, but the toilet has been moved. Someone tries to come in while I’m in there, and I pull the door closed again.

I’m dozing in a chair in a sitting area with a bunch of women I don’t know. One of them asks if I’m looking at her, but I let my eyes glaze over until it’s clear I’m falling asleep. I’m toppling over in my chair. The woman starts talking to the other women in the room and showing them the fistula she has in her breast. She tells them she can reach in all the way down to her knee and then demonstrates. I get up and move to a chaise longue that’s been vacated so I can sleep more comfortably. I’m holding a kitten and set it down before I sit. It takes over the seat, so I sit down anyway and make it give way. It does so only grudgingly, so I’m half-sitting on it and trying not to crush it. It’s long-legged and has silky fur. Another kitten is on the floor and reaches up and is playing with mine, then a third comes over– but I realize it’s the mother cat. She’s a big tabby– one kitten is black and white and the other is grey and white. She gives them a sniff over and then walks a few feet away and flops down gracefully with her back to us.

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bookshelf staircases

I’m visiting the home of a friend, and we’re going through the house, trying to get everyone settled. All the bedrooms have pairs of twin beds with different colored, matching spreads for each room. The rooms are reached by climbing up bookshelves. I have to carefully plan my route up the articulated face of the wall, and sometimes I get it wrong and have to go back down and start up a different way. As we go up floor by floor, all the rooms seem to be occupied by family members, and we never reach the room where I’m supposed to stay. I look over to the side after scaling a particularly challenging wall of shelves and see a staircase that’s been there the whole time.

I’m trying to gather things I’ll need. My toiletry bag is spilled out over the floor on the other side of a table. I crawl under it to reach the stuff and grab a few things and then back out from under the table, my forehead low to the floor. I look back and can’t see how my head possibly fit through because the leg support crossbars are so close to the floor.

I’m walking our dogs with another woman, and we come to a big road. Floyd runs out, and I have to call him sternly back to heel. There are cars way off in the distance, none so close as to be concerned, so I start across. But the road is wider than I realized– it goes on and on, and I have to break into a run to get across ahead of the cars. On the other side there is a rocky hillside. Somehow I’ve fallen behind. The other woman stand way up above, peering out and looking to see where I’ve gone. I pick up the dog to carry him and start up the hill.

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carrying

I’m carrying someone’s baby around, and she’s heavy and awkward and keeps slipping. I keep hefting her up and jostling her, trying to get a better grip. I’m trying to juggle too many things I’m carrying, so I set the baby down. I’m focused on something I’ve placed in one of my bags– I realize it’s not mine and move it to give it back. I look around and can’t find the baby– where did I put her? I’m panicking– I’ve lost the baby! I’m looking and looking, and suddenly there she is up on a precarious ledge by two sinks that are quickly filling with water. I snatch her up and shut off the water. I’m holding her tight and rocking her, but I notice that the look in her eyes is terrified. I’m telling her I’m so so sorry, and she gives me this speaking look, like, yeah, right, okay, but you know what just almost happened. I’ve just had a very close call, and it’s up to me to see that it never happens again.

I’m carrying the baby through a crowd of people, and someone says something about how the baby is mine– I say, I wish. There’s a moment of confusion, and I say, I wish she were mine. I’ve tossed off the comment but realize the truth of it, and a weight seems to lift off, and I hold her tighter.

There’s a children’s show in progress, and I take the baby and grab a seat, trying to turn her in my arms so she can see the stage. But she’s squirming and unwieldy, and I realize the whole thing is lost on her, she’s too young anyway. So I get up to leave, but the floor is slippery and on a slope. I try to go one way and slip and almost fall and turn around and try the other way, which also slopes. I’m having a hard time since my feet can’t get purchase and I can’t use my hands. There are a couple of people up over the slippery part, and one reaches out to help– I hand her the baby and am able to clamber up the rest of the way.

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menopause sucks

No one ever told me how much. It’s the hot flashes mainly– an innocuous term for the sudden conflagrations, wild tempests of heat and drenching sweat, followed by all over clamminess and chill.

But it’s also the end of fertility that it signals, the final nail in the coffin of childbearing possibility. Because even now, even substantially years after the conclusive fertility clinic failure, I still retained the tiniest spark of hope. And now. This red-faced scalding insult to injury.

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itis

What ails me? Anon. And.

I diagnose: at 40 I fretted; at the bend into 48 I’m nigh unrecognizable. Grown fat and slow with middle age. Chris shot a video at some odd moment of me washing dishes. I came across it on my phone and thought, Who is that woman? 

If only to write as of yore, sans excruciating restraint and parsing. I’d like to say, and know, just what I mean. Like that.

There is of course nostalgia, o, folly. The sheer volume of things and people I miss weights me, clots mental teeth. Perhaps most poignantly those which do not deserve the missing. I crave what’s past with tenacious melancholy. No roses while lived but rouged by distance.

Just so, this time, one day, will feel different, stripped of pain and retouched with the tinge of retrospect. I thrust myself forward in a concise act of imagination to that distant moment to feel it differently, and almost can for a moment. Just a glimpse of forecast hindsight.

It relieves uncomfortable stretches of the insistent present, in which it’s hard to sit still, hard to stand. Aches abloom in joints that worked fine previously. Oil can, squeaks the imagination.

That woman at the sink, remember her? A balloon she may be, yet not altogether untethered. Tugging in the wind.

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sedimentary

Here’s what I’m doing: dredging out. Layers and layers of dusted-under sensibility, sedimented over a period of months. Geologically a blip; experientially an eternity.

What to say, really? Second-guessing does me in time and again. The only tonic for it seems to be outright utterance. Just hitting publish and let the pixels spin. What blogging is supposed to be anyway. And it occurs to me that I haven’t really blogged in years–or maybe ever. Always so hyper-aware of what I’ve written and rehashing it. So here I am, trying to do it differently, to unbury.

I sit on the 27th floor of a Chicago highrise, watching fat spiders suspended outside wobble in wafts, oblivious to height, busy casting and repairing webs to withstand wind and fix prey. I traverse shopping crowds on Michigan Avenue daily to and from the train station, passing familiar homeless people with their signs or sayings or rhythmic cup-shakings day in, day out. Everyday I’m someplace in the middle, navigating between extremes and under the radar.

What’s it like to be invisible? Feels like outliving oneself. Still here and yet not. I remember be-ing, but I haven’t in a long while.

All around are people pushing strollers, holding hands, going about daily business, and it feels nothing so much as utterly dislocating. Writing is supposed to help. I guess we’ll see.

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what desperation looks like

In my thirtieth year I became filled with a wild and unquenchable wanting. I could not sate it with sin though I tried my hardest, white knuckling the miles between a sweet, arid marriage and sweaty sex on bare stretches of hardwood in naked rooms with sour towels and stale toilet paper and meltingly delectable sensation, consternation, damnation, sheer heedless hurtling into utter oblivion, my lord, o, oh and more oh.