Stilled isolation and forgotten sock sounds make the harmony of my attempt at beginning.
I don’t remember why but I guess a week ago a cop friend called my mother, said he was taking me to a hospital, a psych hospital. Mom came to visit. Felt she had to. Resented it. But. Came nonetheless. It was like usual. Five days to stabilize the meds, to ask all the right questions, to teach me to cope, again, to deal with my mother and the paperwork, and then to set me free as if my mind would allow it.
Mom left yesterday, which is fine.
How do you do your best to sort everything with a glued-back-together-and-held-by-vice-grips mind? You can’t ask anyone for help with this part. No one knows what you mean. If they do know, they pretend ignorance. So just hush and hurry to fracture your constant stream with prism eyes as information comes sideways.
Inanimate things take their toll on me. My socks rest where they were left on an unremembered day. I think about my broken mind and try to let the glue dry. Let it harden while dealing with the coming of a teakettle in the apartment next door. Culling awareness, I put what I hear in different places with their pictures of female members of the family. Or men, sometimes, for the guy sounds. Distant traffic revving at the streetlight goes into a memory of the accidental night. Gasping hawks get put away with photographs of my father. Inside the socks lay crinkled on the couch and still. Weighing me down with their no-sound way to put them anywhere.
If the floor is, in fact, under the bed, it will not sink, I guess. But who can be sure where the floor ever is?
But if the floor is, in fact, under the bed, then I guess I am pretty hungry. Jell-O would be great. Knox Blox, to be exact. Cut out with nestable cookie cutters of different-sized stars. Slip yellow points into red corners and be good enough, be someone worthy, be happy to put one star inside the other like it shows how to do on the package. But you need vegetable oil that has no flavor to grease the perpendicular-pressure aluminum. I only have sesame oil. And I hate eating art.
So then what? Gravy? I don’t know how to make gravy. What’ll I do with the lumps? There will be lumps because I am not good enough to make anything come out right. I don’t know how to make gravy or anything so they gave me a brochure about self-esteem and said to check a website once a week for coping tips. I can chat in real time with a trained counselor who’s twenty-two and makes eight fifty an hour. Sometimes, even so, a yearning rises and grips my center, sending me into a kind of God-lust. Sometimes a yearning comes undone and drifts sideways, changing Mother’s hand-me-down thoughts into a kind of almost-wonderland.
Life being half indebted inheritance and half unrealized potential, I am trying to resurface in an unrecognized welcome.
I am awash in similarity. I don’t even have what-ifs. But whatever. Instead of getting anywhere with my vision of the meta-almosts I end up with all sorts of not-quite-good-enoughs and probably-could-have-beens and just give up buying anything with built-in obsolescence, like boyfriends and homes, though it seems there is nothing but continuing. No splendor. No deep roots. Simply the day-by-day inebriation of adulthood.
The church tears at the politician who shouts at the people and says, “Hope. Change.” Change what? Hope for whom? Myself with others? My other realms with each other? You have got to be kidding. My rhythm of death-days has become so same, so unending, and I am succumbing to the trance of disbelief that shrouds nations.
But. It’s okay. There’s a pill for what ails me. Just do the laundry. Clean the bathroom. Hang the towels. Spray 409 on the stove. Water the plants. Go to the gym. Feed yourself. Clothe yourself. Take out the trash. Enjoy things like music, books, TV shows, and beach volleyball. Participate. Learn. Invest. Grow. Plan a trip to meet indigenous peoples in a rain forest and discuss intercultural affairs on an ecotourism adventure that’s well-enough controlled to be both liberating and safe. Airplanes are natural. Drive your car. Don’t let the gas tank get too low. Pay for things with cash. Live within your means. Hang up the clothes. Mop the floor. Do the dishes. Remember the import of eating a balanced diet, of exercise, of maintaining relationships, of having people over to smell your scented candles, to pet your dogs, to comment on your wall art, to play your piano, to rifle through your medicine cabinet, and to sit back down on your couch pretending nothing ever happened.
The house sits animated but still ready to pounce around me with its penetrating unspoken screams. Ready to emerge as life moving on.
Sandwich. Bread. Pepperidge Farm white bread. Fresh. Mayonnaise. Salt and pepper. Leftover baked rotisserie chicken breast. Lettuce. Not iceberg but romaine. Or buttercrunch, I think they call it. Tomato. No. Tomato on the side with more mayonnaise and salt and pepper.
The bed is moving. No. The walls are moving. No. It’s the clouds outside the window streaming by. And the bed is dropping away through the floor I knew didn’t really exist and couldn’t.
I have to eat. That’s what they say. “You have to eat.” They say if you can feed yourself sufficiently then you don’t have to go to strange places where the doors are heavier than the walls that ripple, haunted and waterlogged with similar muzzled lives. So different than seedy hotels. So same. So eat. I have to eat.
It’s not pieces of your mind falling into shattered disarray again, unsortable. It’s low blood sugar.
Sandwich. There must be a way.
Fight. Like Christina in Wyeth’s muted grass world. Make your way to what you want, what you need, what you have to have. Make a well-deserved sustenance for yourself—your body and mind.
The store is only three blocks away. You can make it. You can do this alone. But is there any money? Under the table in the hall: don’t you remember seeing a quarter? Yes. But that’s been at least five years ago and it was at home in—well, wherever that was. But the floor was a cheap, lacquered jewelry box from Japan. A tourist trinket and black, almost, under that table. It was dark reddish-fade-to-black hardwood veneer that will never chip off. And the quarter was just there somehow in a beam of sunlight. And I saw it. I didn’t pick it up. But I saw it there just like that under the foyer table on the souvenir floor. Still, just like that years ago. But it wouldn’t be enough to take to the store today anyway.
Mom said there was money in a drawer. She is always using drawers for things, like money, that shouldn’t be hidden, that need to be seen.
But pull yourself toward the creation of a sustaining reality.
Commit to small certainties. The salt will sit on the chicken breast and on the skin from the rotisserie and you will just barely be able to see how you’ve seasoned it.
I remember sandwiches like that.
I have to eat.
I will make a sandwich like that.
There are three dollars in my coat. I know the money’s there. Or at least I hope it is. Hope it hasn’t been changed. But it’s probably there from the time I bought cigarettes across the street. Good. Yes. Here it is. It’s real. I remembered it right and I am holding it with two hands, touching it, checking, counting, assuring myself again, and counting again, but yes, it’s here. It’s really here. This is one thing that’s not an illusion, an expectation, a hope, a change, a delusion, a hallucination, a must-have-remembered-it-wrong embarrassed moment, a confusion, a frustration, a trust, an unknowing, a worry, a panic, a thought-so-but-no. It’s real.
So. I won. I’m fine. I remembered it right, which means it’s real, I’m fine, and my broken brain didn’t process it wrong. Not this time. This time I remembered it right. There was three dollars in my coat pocket. I was right. It’s real. It’s right here in my hand. It’s real. I’m looking at it and it’s here. I feel it and it’s real.
So the coat and the drawer and as long as the floor is there again we’re okay. We’re okay and we’re not going anywhere without shoes and a hat. Where is the hat? I guess it doesn’t matter as long as I have the beach towel memory. The one with the dancing Planters peanut on it from all those lost beach summers. God. When will this glue dry? I need to find my hat. I don’t need to remember a twenty-year-old, navy blue, dancing top-hat-and-cane monocled-peanut towel on a clotheslined breeze.
Just focus and find the floor. Test it for rotten spots with your leading toe.
The coat. The drawer. The door. The stairs. And another door to the porch. Fine. I’m okay. I’m okay. Just act normal. No one even knows. No one even knows. No one even knows. No one can see your glazed-cherry-blossom-broken-vase glue drying or all the brain pieces held in place so carefully with direct pressure. Just keep walking. Just be careful. Do everything the right way. Look both ways. Cross the street when other people cross the street. Give up when no one else seems to care. Just relax. Relax. There is nothing emotional or psychological or pathological or anything that needs psychiatric care between here and the grocery store. The sidewalk can’t do that. It didn’t. So breathe in again and just keep going. Sidewalks don’t move. Just keep going. Breathe out again and don’t worry. It didn’t happen.
It might just be the pills.
Did I take my pills? Did I take them? Or was that this morning? Or yesterday? Or did the pills go through the wall to the teakettle sound where the floor fell down into the sinkhole of a grass world impossible to traverse while dragging two crippled limbs across the field of color that must be carpet hanging like a pet-door trap that keeps out the elements with the help of towels on clotheslines and quarters and breeze under foyer tables on jewelry box floors from five years ago?
Just keep walking.
Don’t hold your breath. Don’t panic. Don’t worry. Don’t cry. Just keep walking.
Nothing’s happening. Everything’s fine. Everything’s normal. There’s no problem.
And some people do understand. A lot of people have been through this. There were plenty of people in that hospital. This is not just you. You’re just the only one in your head. But you’re not the only one who this has ever happened to. So. Breathe. Relax. Understand the biochemistry, the physiology, the genetics, the statistics, the probabilities, the diagnoses, the family history, the reasons why.
I remember someone’s telling me about a huge revolving door in a supermarket with a tank of fish in the middle. The tank is drained now. Broken. I wonder how they drained it. Hope the fish got out okay.
Don’t worry about that. That doesn’t matter. It’s not related. The money is real and it’s related to the sandwich parts you still need.
Grocery store. The fruit is amazing, isn’t it? Isn’t it? Where does it all come from? All this fruit to all these grocery stores. Can it possibly be used, all this fruit? It can’t possibly be consumed. I guess it just goes on sale. Is that it? It’s not like the bins of screws at the hardware store. These rot.
Don’t waste your time reading little stickers of distant provenance and feeling sorry for soft mangoes.
Mayonnaise. I don’t know where it is. Where is it? Bread. And how about pickles? Yes, pickles. There is definitely enough money with the coat and the drawer.
Don’t wander. If you can’t find the bread, go back to the produce section and start over. Just go up and down all the aisles. Focus. Concentrate. You’re looking for bread.
See? There it is. That’s where the bread is. That’s how you do it. That’s how you find things you know must be there.
You’re done. Now. Go pay.
Smile at the lady. Just smile at the lady. Pretend. It’s all just pretend. Smile again.
Don’t look through her. She’ll know.
Say, “Thank you. Have a nice day.” And say it like no awareness is cascading over you.
Push. Don’t panic. Fish don’t matter.
The sky seems more.
Back to the house. Back to the house. Back to the house. And breathe. Breathe. If you know it, they know it. So just breathe. Breathe. Carry the bag and breathe.
Up the stairs. There is a lock on the door but the key is here somewhere. I live here so it’s okay. I have the key. That’s allowed. So go ahead, just ease on in.
Sit.
Okay.
Okay.
Sit. Sandwich.
But the knife. No way. Not today. Just fingers today. Just pull the chicken apart. And use a spoon for the mayonnaise. It’s good enough. No knife. Not today. Maybe next time, but not today. Knives are too full of potential. Too easy to take off fingers and toes. Too easy to pull the skin off shins and ankles. Too easy to peel away the eyelids and soft places next to the ears. And so not today. Use the spoon today. Ignore the tremor.
Salt.
Pepper.
And pickles, sitting in the chair by the window.
Finally.