lycanthropia

I think I might as well admit that I no longer know what I’m doing.

It’s a rainy day. Pyewacket is doing that thing where she wants to go outside to pee but it’s raining so she sits by the front door and cries forlornly, instead of using her litter pan. Everything cold is dripping with condensation, like my water bottle and my iced matcha (in the beautiful cream-colored “J” cup that Alicia gave me, which helps me remember who I am on mornings when I am not quite sure). I really pretty much use the air conditioner as a dehumidifier, at this point.

My left hand fingernails are painted metallic turquoise (by the neighbor, last night, who did nearly as bad a job as I generally do, streaky and uneven, but he managed not to spill any nail polish on the copy of Aristotle he was using to hold my hand steady) and my right hand fingernails are metallic lilac. I don’t know how I feel.

It’s nearly noon and I slept till ten and I’ve had my matcha and my almonds and my vitaminas but still can’t get going. I have no business blogging but look, here I am doing it anyway. This weekend I have to (get to?) write that blooming ten-page institutional-history-of-English paper, write a book review, and grade 27 papers. It’s not that much work only I feel kind of wobbly, physically and emotionally. And it’s hard for me to bracket my inner fragility and just strap it on and do shit. I wish I were tougher or less distractible. But I am stricken by beauty instead and so I have to tell someone about it.

Smallest but first and most quotidian is this wonderful blueberry soap my friend Ra sent me from Germany. I get to travel vicariously through my friends in Frankfurt and Kyoto, it’s magical. She sent me a beautiful care package which arrived on the day I was sickest from Diflucan, a cute red geisha mug and blueberry tea and a candle and this perfect square of a soap with the words “HEIDELBERGEN HEIDELBEERE” on it, and it’s this amazing violet-blue color, even the suds are blue, and it smells like heidelbeeren and I’m crazy about it, even though I can’t use it in the shower as I’m trying really hard not to get soap on my poor tortured hooha these days. So I use it as hand soap and that way I get to admire it every few hours. It’s strange how something ostensibly so small can enter my aesthetic consciousness so powerfully and lodge there, I seriously want to write poems that are as beautiful as this soap.

Then there is the reading I went to last night, at Brazos Bookstore, featuring fiction writers Celeste Prince (meticulous, incisive) and Thomas Calder (blunt, hilarious). But the part that undid me was Sophie Klahr reading these tender stripped-open poems that, I can’t help it, I have to post this picture, they remind me of the cover of the brand-new Black Warrior Review and how lush and heartbroken and frail and stubborn I find that image, and how my friend Farren made that whole magazine, she made it despite feeling like shit, she is also fragile and unbelievably, lyrically stubborn.

And last night I curled up in an armchair at the Brazos and somehow fell in terrible love with all of these at once, the cover and Sophie and Farren and the poems and how sore my heart is, and there I was in an armchair in love, with tears in my eyes. It’s a beautiful thing. I love that poems can do that. Bring me to tears.

But I am scared to cry, even though I feel I might could use a good cry, mostly because 1) I spent too much of the last year crying, bitter choking sobs in the car driving home at night from anywhere, I’m done with that crying, and 2) what if I can’t stop and get depressed again and have to go back on high doses of drugs, no, it’s not safe to cry.

Which brings me to brain zaps.

(Also Sophie Klahr has the same Nan Goldin photograph up on her blog and somehow this seems like an omen to me. And look at these adorable drawings! Okay fine I admit it, I have a new poet crush are you happy now.)

So brain zaps. So you know sometimes I take medication, and sometimes I don’t (as Repat writes about so eloquently). Mostly I do; but right now I am believe it or not pretty even-keeled and also I am hungry to read better, concentrate harder, think long thoughts, so I thought I might try for a while going without. Do you know that SNRIs dig their little seratonergic hooks into the soft grey matter of your brain. I know it. So I’ve been discontinuing (a nice euphemism, but really let’s be honest, I’ve been trying to kick) for the last month off an already minuscule dose of Effexor, which has been historically my drug of salvation when I just want to lie down on the floor and die, and I’m lucky that I hardly have to take any meds to get the salvational effect, I am a super cheap date. So I’ve been taking 75 mg qd, that’s two capsules a day, each capsule 37.5 mg, such a strange number, 37.5, like an age, and in fact I remember being very happy when I was 37.5. To taper off this tiny amount, I did first one week at 37.5 + 1/2, one week at 37.5, two weeks at 1/2, this week my first week on none and I’ve still been taking 1/2 of 37.5 every other day because the brain zaps are knee-weakening. So let me tell you about brain zaps.

Brain zaps come at irregular intervals, I get one every thirty seconds or so, more often when I’m using a computer. They’re like you’ve turned your head too fast or focused your eyes too quickly, a small wall of mental noise comes at your brain, people compare it to electricity but to me it feels more like water, something rushing between your ears, some indefinably loud yet soft yet scratchy yet also kind of zingy and exciting tensile stuff coming at you all in a solid gaseous form. It briefly envelopes your entire head, as if wrapping it in fabric, and then wavers onward, leaving you reeling and swallowing and kind of breathless. I can’t really hear or see during the half-second or two seconds they are happening, but they’re not unpleasurable, only they’re also kind of terrible. It’s funny because just a few years ago psychiatrists barely believed in them; now they have their own websites, the brain zaps—which makes it sound like they’re out there paying for hosting and writing code, but you know what I mean.

Some people call them brain shivers. I love that this article notes that in Denmark they’re called svimmelhed!

So yeah, basically in addition to the angry hooha I also have the svimmelhed. Which is just yet another reason not to want to work on academic writing but GUESS WHAT TOO BAD WRITE YOUR DAMN PAPER JLOWE.

Probably I just need a meeting, or a therapist. Or more matcha. Or antibiotics. Pye for example was just now all affectionate and purry, cuddling up to the computer and sitting cutely on EMW Tillyard’s 1958 history of English studies at Cambridge (“The women had their own lecture list, printed obscurely at the end of the University Reporter, after the official part of that publication”). Then she suddenly turned around and, overstimulated, bit me on the arm. There are little white tooth-marks now, which make me laugh. She’s as confused as I am.

I really don’t know what I’m doing here. This better be a good thing.

I don’t know how to tell anything the way it is, I was thinking this yesterday looking out the window feeling racked simultaneously with hope and suicidality and thinking of all the days that go by during which I don’t ever manage to tell anyone or write down exactly how it is, yesterday afternoon looking out the window during a break while I was hypomanically cleaning, a siege of cleaning seized me after a weekend of headcold and tissues and sofa, I was scrubbing out the toilet with the sage and lemongrass cleaner, sneezing, wiping baseboards almost angrily with a finger as I hoovered up the dust bunnies, more like dust buffalos, changing cat-hair-strewn bed linens, wondering when I will stop thinking of them as our sheets and start thinking of them as just mine, wandering out into the yard and yanking up weeds that obstruct the grass so the cat cannot curl up in the grass where she would like, making a pile of wet green weeds and then just as suddenly going back inside and sitting down on the sofa and going through all the 2010 receipts, from when we had joint checking, hundreds of them throwing receipts into the recycling in fistfuls, saving out only the ones for tax deductions (medication co-pays, therapy co-pays, premiums, the price of sanity). On the receipts his signature over and over, dinners we had together, vacations we took, hotel receipts from spring break a year ago (the Santa Rita Lodge, the hummingbirds, the sound of the creek, the lovemaking late into the night), receipts with his handwriting on the back, phone numbers and email addresses and notes from AA meetings (WE ARE THE IDENTIFIED PATIENTS OF OUR CULTURE. MY ADDICTIONS ARE MY PATH) and then one receipt with three I Ching hexagrams on the back. I kept that one so my friend Farren could tell me what they meant. (Then today she told me and I could not take it in, it was too enormous somehow and I went into the bedroom to think about it and instead fell asleep for nearly two hours, that bad kind of nap where you fall asleep in the day and wake up in the dark and your body doesn’t know what you want it to do.) Somewhere in the receipts were ones for him withdrawing $100, $200 cash. I threw, I threw, I threw them all away and felt so deeply refreshed by that I wondered why I hadn’t done it months ago. A merciless paragraph.

Finally there was nothing left to clean but the mountain and I do mean mountain of dirty dishes generated since AWP. They scare me. And now there was nothing between me and the dishes but the last six student papers, I stood there trembling ridiculously, half-panting, feeling wild-eyed and pointless, not knowing how to slow myself down enough to do either task. I thought, I should eat. I thought, I haven’t taken my meds today. I called my therapist finally and it took her forty minutes of talking, but we got me settled enough to make and drink a cup of tea (lavender and chamomile) and to put comments on the two worst papers. The two that I’d shuddered over and dreaded doing anything with for three weeks. I am so behind in the course I am teaching, we are two weeks behind the syllabus, next week is spring break already and we are just so behind and it’s my fault, because I look at the papers I’ve been handed and my mind goes perfectly blank and my stomach plummets, one of the students had written on Amy Chua’s tiger mother editorial and every time the word “Chinese” appeared the student had spelled it, “chine’s.” When students produce this kind of writing almost always English was not their home language and they almost always they show a learning/processing deficit and almost never am I going to be able to address it in English 102 and almost always are they going to be angry at me no matter what happens.

I ate Amy’s frozen cheese enchiladas while I put comments on all six papers. Then it was 11 pm and I started getting ready for bed. Then I went to bed. Then I woke up three times slick and chilled with sweat, my hair plastered in long strands to the side of my neck. Once in the night the cat wheezed, she has a hairball again. I did what I always do while I lie half-asleep half-awake in bed all night long, I pray, I send love to him, in the direction where his house is, sometimes I try to lull myself to sleep by pretending I am sleeping in his arms, sometimes I try to send love to myself, sometimes I make up bits of poems I know I will forget, sometimes I turn on the light and read Chaucer or another book by my bed (right now Sarah Vap, Thalia Field, Ariana Reines, Allison Carter, Teresa Carmody, all my still-new and stiff-covered AWP books), sometimes I count my breaths or sometimes just fold myself up in the covers even no matter if I am not cold, I fold myself up into a still tight package and just wait.

I don’t know how to tell anything the way it is, I have a premenstrual headache over my eyebrows and just drank a bottle of orange carrot juice leftover from my cold, you’re supposed to drink juice when you have a cold so I did, I was still miserable and at once point I texted my sponsor and said I am missing him really badly today, do you have any suggestions and she called me immediately, I always forget I can ask for help, she said, Of course, this is happening because you are sick and vulnerable, you should be nursing yourself back to health, she used that phrase and it enchanted me, nursing myself back to health, so we got off the phone and I made that too-salty bright-yellow chicken soup from a packet and had another popsicle and read a reading she suggested on kindness and gentleness, she said this is the time for the slogan “Easy Does It” and the thing about the slogans is as everyone knows they are ridiculous, the most obvious clichéd phrases, and yet the other equally true thing about the slogans is they work.

And but so today I felt better and woke up and showered and took a minute to look at myself in the mirror, I noticed for the first time my left arm is browner than my right, probably from driving, I resolved to wear more sunscreen on my arms, I noticed my breasts that used to seem disproportionately full when I was really skinny now seem disproportionately smaller since the rest of me is full, a body is like an accordion box, growing here and shrinking there, I saw how really some of my curves were quite fine and I knew, this is the funny thing, I knew right away he would love them, how he always would say breathlessly, I love the shapes of you, and here were these shapes and no one to admire them but me, then I said something terse aloud to myself and got in the shower, then I put on my favorite gray t-shirt and jeans.

Then I drove to exurbia and taught and it was fine and no one flipped out on me or anything. The student who hides behind his black hoodie and the bearded student who argues for the right to bear arms, even they were cheerful and we were all fine, even the student who wrote “chine’s” because he wasn’t there.

And the whole time, all this time, throbbing in my mind is the refrain of wanting to text him, my ex, just the word, “Love.” Because how can you argue with that? How can you say, don’t send me love? Love that is universal and large and contains multitudes?

I dimly remember that I have made the rule for myself that I am not supposed to text or call or email him but at these moments I cannot remember why, and my brain presents me with seemingly logical reasons why it is okay, and I though I mistrust my brain at such moments, it seems completely clear and reasonable to text him, and I’m not sure why I haven’t for three months. Love! It’s just love, how can any harm come from love. My love for him seems as natural as drinking the orange carrot juice or petting the cat when she comes in from the front yard exclaiming and trilling and telling me her little stories which I cannot really understand but listen to just the same, like parents of incoherent small children, I nod and say yes, yes, and thusly encouraged she tells me more, tells me all about it, the yard, the grass, the smells, what was out there.

I did email my friend Farren the hexagrams and she kindly looked them up and told me what they are. I can’t understand, the I Ching is something he did, not me, I don’t understand their meanings, #20 Contemplating and #48 The Well. I don’t remember whose hexagram was whose, on the back of the receipt, the front of the receipt says May 30 so I suppose we had already started breaking up by then. I have really started to hate this blogpost but I keep writing it anyway because sometimes to do something new you have to do something you really hate.

This is what one of my thesis committee members used to say and I thought of it during the writers conference when I brought in the five poems I wrote in the first five months after the breakup, the short poems that came grudgingly one per month, right before my period, and they seem to me so plain and narrative and ugly, nothing prepossessing about their language or their length or their anything, dull poems to me, American McPoems. But they were what I had to workshop so I brought them. And she said, Connie Voisine said (who was an amazingly gracious and gentle teacher, and one who really brought her entire attention very generously to our work)—well, I typed out what she said and it was like this, I am going to resist my temptation to edit my notes so here they are:

• anaphora—catalogue poems, accretion/accumulation
• “It’s so much more interesting than a poem like this could be.”
• the thing that comes next is a jolt and that’s how the energy accumulates
• the interest comes from the intersection of things you do eat and things you don’t
• scale—large/small, impossible to eat, movement, keeps it exciting
• the activity of accounting all these things that are still around
• “I wasn’t sure if bread was the right object for that incredibly important section”
• I read bread as singular, and then when I get to the loaves I’m not in the image anymore
• I was refusing, I ate…she cuts what was eaten
• exploring parallelism as a strategy to take advantage of, structure the emotion
• events/details seemingly random, but the intuitive connection is what is wanted, the ones we’re getting, the ones that are crucial—?
• confusion around PLACE—the bus, the swimming pool, then images of home—?
• an obsessive accounting that allows for some of the more digressive elements
• “if you’ve had that experience, it’s a high point” (the swimsuit spinner at the gym)
• the way anaphora depends upon the speed of the list—so it seems like just another moment or item, so people don’t get committed to it as a location—2/3 lines of description slows the poem enough to make us feel like being there
• strategies to resist confessing the actual details of the betrayal, they resist the confessional
• this lovely movement—the mesquite, the volunteer trees—a contradiction, then another definition/redefining of the situation, another refinement/correction—that’s how lyric poems move—you start here, you redefine, prevarication—is the movement of lyric
• at that point the speaker has permission to reflect—because of the preceding active thought

That was all very nice of her. She was so nice to those five poems, which are bald little catalogue poems, lumpy and homely. I feel embarrassed about them but they are what I have to show for those five months, so I’d be better off befriending them more and trying to revise them to be better at working with what they have, the little machinery of each poem as Connie Voisine would say, I asked, do you mean the conceit? the poem’s operant metaphor? and she said yes but also no, she preferred to say the little engine or machine that makes each poem work.

And her little blonde daughter was so adorable, with tiny sneakers with lights in them, and messy hair, bossily taking pictures of things, including me, with her mom’s cellphone, and Connie Voisine calling her “little bitty.”

To do anything new sometimes you have to do something you really hate.

What I have been trying to say and not managing to say is that I love myself, and that scares me. That the body will be taken away eventually and it is best not to love it. That I am clean and fresh-smelling and beautiful and curvy today, in my favorite t-shirt, the soft Calvin Klein gray one that fits perfectly, and my new soft dark blue skinny jeans, and in honor of how pretty and womanly I felt I decided to wear my matching dragon-patterned turquoise blue bra and underwear, that I bought in 2005 specially for him, thinking we might hook up and so I needed a new set of lingerie which wouldn’t remind me of anyone else, and now here they still are although I don’t fit into them quite as well as I did, I am trying to write what it’s like to have a grown woman’s body where the hip straps of the underwear press into the hip fat and there’s a gentle curve coming in and out there, and a red mark left behind if the strap shifts, and you bend over to pour your breast into the cup of the bra but when you stand back upright it still is spilling out of the outside of the cup a little bit, and I catch myself thinking with fascinated irritation, this is all wasted because no one is seeing it, there is no gaze, no one to love it, and then I think, Well, okay so I should love it, but then who admires their own womanly body? That seems even stranger. Maybe like drinking the good wine, the champagne, alone. Then I just put on my sneakers and some soft berry lipgloss, it is not a day for lipstick, I fill a water bottle and print out an attendance sheet and get ready to go teach.

Another day over and another day closer. Thank you for this.