Losing True

50

I am just now back from celebrating a Really Big birthday. That is all a person as old as myself can conjure to say at the moment. I will add, though, that Massachusetts is as wonderful as it always is, even in the rain. More to come, but only after a nap—which I will assume now becomes a daily staple. 

Leave me where I am

As I was putting my younger son to bed tonight (which involves me hovering a room away, reminding him to do X, then Y, then Z, then Z, then Z, and so on) the song "I'm Only Sleeping" by the Beatles drifted into my head. I remembered all of it, much to my son's annoyance. Slow, dreamy, in a minor key. (The only thing more annoying than the fact that not every Beatles song is available on iTunes is the reason: Michael Jackson.) 

I remember when I discovered sleep as a teenager, which was kind of like discovering orgasms—a world you could enter that was, finally, all your own. 

A month ago I had reached the point where several people were wringing their hands, concerned about my lack of sleep. There was one five-day period in which I slept a total of 4 hours, none of them sequential. The line between conscious and unconscious thought became blurred for me, so that I began to lose touch with what was real and what was like a dream—I would think it, so maybe it had happened, was happening. Even now I don't have the words to frame what fading from my own grasp felt like.

Then, overriding the policies of AA and my pleading, a doctor insisted that I choose between taking medicine to sleep or checking into a hospital so they could monitor me. I chose the drugs. I called the doctor back the next morning and told him it didn't work. "You're kidding," he said. I assured him I was not. He prescribed something else, and told me to take Benadryl the next night on top of that medicine. If that didn't work, he said, it was the hospital.

Whichever it was that worked, the next night I slept for four hours. And the night after that, longer. Then, within a few days, sleep and I fell back into the passionate love affair we'd had when I was a teenager. We never wanted to be out of each other's sight. I began to think of my bed with fervent lust; I'd walk past it (I never bothered to make it, since I would pounce on it at any chance I had) and check it out as if it was a hot guy. 

When I brought this up to the psychiatrist he cited the years of emotional exhaustion behind me. Take it, he said. Just let it happen. He is of the belief that I sustained an injury to my head, and that, like I did after my concussion as a kid, I needed to sleep.

The sensation is much more like the post-concussion experience, in that I still only sleep for chunks of time, usually about 4 to 6 hours. But when I wake it is as if from under a great and knowing weight, a delicious and unyielding comfort, as if I have fallen into a feather bed six feet deep that's curled around me. It's not a drugged feeling. Everything is warmth, and I want to get deeper in the warmth. When I try to raise my head, a gentle hand presses me back down. Shhhhhh, someone says. 

And the dreams: filled with light, and flying. One night I dreamed I had telekinesis. I started out moving glasses of water around, and then realized I could make people fly. I crashed them into things at first, but then got it. I figured out how to fly myself, with them, while I slept.

 

Hey kids, play the First Day of High School game with me

It's easy and it's fun. Just use the words "I don't know"  to respond to any question your mom or dad asks you. Anything at all. Here are some examples:

1. Where is your your backpack?

2. Did you find your cell phone?

3. What floor is your homeroom on? (A fair question since you were just there for several hours yesterday.)

4. Do you know where your schedule is?

5. What time is school over?

6. Do you want to walk home?

A really exciting twist is to substitute "Huh?" or a blank look for "I don't know." 

In the advanced version of the game, just as your parent is pulling out of the driveway with 5 minutes to go to the homeroom bell, remember your cell phone is in the basement. Announce this, but don't move.

Smoke gets in your eyes

Tonight I went to see the man—a psychiatrist—who not only was the first professional to insist I stop drinking, but also the person who saved me when I crashed several months after that detox. When I sat down across from him, he was smiling.

"What?" I asked him. I had said something to him about how hard his door was to open.

"You made a joke," he said. "You must be feeling better." And it's true, although better is a relative term, of course.

What charmed me about talking with him tonight was how supportive he is of me as a person, as the particular person I am. To him I'm not only a set of chemicals reacting in a body. I have a history, and a self—I have a personality wound around a style of emoting that he gets. I've had lots of people tell me this is rare in a psychiatrist, and I feel lucky to have found him.

He kept smiling as I talked, and when I explained how I had hit on how important it was for me to accept myself as an emotional person, someone who feels things intensely—and what I was looking for in a relationship as a result, he thought for a minute.

"It's like that Platters song, Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, right?"

Spooky, because I had just been listening to that song in the car. I was thinking I had never really heard before what the lyricist was saying, that in order to really feel love—the good parts and the hard parts of it—you have to get close to its flame. In the future, which I hope is not too far away, I'll know when to close my eyes and let the smoke pass by. But even if it stings, it's worth it, because the flame is too delicious to avoid.

Thirteen years of sweet

My girlfriend’s daughter, with whom I just spent a week (along with my own children) woke up smiling this morning. Come to think of it, she woke up smiling every morning, her sweet face framed by tousled dark curls. I told her, as I passed her on the stairs at 8 a.m., that I had just come back from the bakery and had gotten her an apple fritter.

“That’s why I love you,” she said with a tiny giggle.

A few days ago she and I swam out into the center of a gorgeous freshwater pond together. No one was near us; the water rippled gently in the sun, and swallows swarmed overhead. It was so quiet I could hear their wing strokes. She swam ahead of me, and kept turning back to grin. “This is heaven,” she said, without a trace of irony.

As her mother and I were getting ready for dinner that night, the two of us traded typically middle-aged girl talk: I was make-up free and modestly dressed; my girlfriend was worried she was showing too much cleavage. Her daughter stood behind us, her hands on her hips.

“The two of you!” she said in exasperation. “You both look fabulous, but you don’t realize it!”

When my children’s father came by tonight to bring our dog home, we pummeled him with stories about the trip, including my youngest jumping off a landmark bridge into the ocean many feet below, gorging on seafood, perfect weather—typical details. Then I said how sweet my girlfriend’s daughter had been.

“Was she pretty?” he asked my oldest son, who smiled down at the floor and kept his counsel. For once.

You could gobble that girl up with a spoon. If only she had fit in my luggage.

Cecilias

Have you ever seen a sky filled with stars and a thunderstorm both? Tonight I sat out on the deck of this house that looks over the ocean, and I saw that. And I thought: that is the sky I want for my life. I want to see the pitch black ball of the storm and the clear sky behind it and the stars. I want to see the trees and the beach and the lights from houses and the expanse of no houses. I want it all.

I read Ann Patchett's The Patron Saint of Liars today. I have been reading the way someone who's motion sick keeps their eyes trained on the horizon to steady themselves. The minute I start to feel that sinking, that gravitational pull into sadness again, I open a book and start reading. At the bookstore this morning, I asked the two women behind the counter to recommend something, anything. They looked at me, so differently dressed than all the milling customers nearby, most of whom were wearing pink shorts patterned with lobsters or martini glasses. I stood there in my grubby black t-shirt and jeans, my hair wildly curling with the ocean's humidity, wearing glasses. They blinked at me. "I have a broken heart," I said, gesturing vaguely toward my chest. Without missing much of a beat: "Ok," said the older one. "I've got something."

And in that book, I found a character who reminded me of my boyfriend. Her name is Cecilia. (There are two Cecilias; this one is the namesake of the second.)

"When a person has left you as many times as Cecilia left me, you could see it coming from miles away. The first thought of going makes a sound as clear as somebody saying your name." 

I read that and laid the book down on my stomach. I was stretched out on the floor next to a bunk bed, keeping my younger son company as he fell asleep. The passage soothed me, spoke that sinking feeling, the dread that came over me again and again because I always knew I had a Cecilia on my hands. I'm forever choosing Cecilias. 

Now, sitting on this deck, I want to wave them all away, but I'm too worn out by their antics to move an inch. I'm just watching the storm slide off to the north.

You probably think this post is about you

Ask yourself: why are you reading these words, what is it you want from them?

A changing wind was sent from the south overnight, howling past the house. 

When I woke I expected a black sky, after that mournfulness. But it was clear.

This is a poem, then, in its sound, and it is what I was trying to tell you.

It is not the words as much as how they cause you to think, act, be.

Now choose how you will: but the words I sent went through you, are yours.

Nurse Betty

I woke up this morning to a persistent phrase of music—it was hopeful, determinedly so, and a little offbeat. I couldn't place it for over an hour. My children and I sat on the deck of the house we're renting, looking at the turquoise water of the Atlantic while we ate breakfast. "What's that song you keep humming?" my son asked me. I didn't know.

Then while I was in the outdoor shower it came to me: the song from the movie Nurse Betty. Within the first few days after my boyfriend left me, I watched that movie, wrapped in a blanket and stupid with pain.

It's interesting how the brain works at things, turns them over and over even as it seems to be walking forward, how it ruminates even when no process is apparent. Somewhere in my subconscious that song got recorded and carefully placed in the slot: Remember this. Remember that you identified with Betty's half-sleep, and the way she kept herself asleep in a pretend world, like a drug-induced coma, to keep from knowing what was wrong until she could stand it.

Fresh meat

 

I remember when someone—possibly my brother—got the first cordless phone in the family. “Talking to you from the deck,” he said when he called me—or wherever it was he was standing. He was outside. It seemed impossible.

One week without a laptop and that sensation of luck and freedom came back to me when I opened my new one. Oh little rectangle that cost so freaking much, you and I will go through a lot together, and I’ll use you in places beyond imagination.

Though right now the crappy couch in my family room is doing it for me. And speed? I could live three lives at once, at this rate.

What can endure

Coming out of this depression has been like waking from a dream, but in slow motion: varying stages of awareness present themselves to me--strings of images without real context at first, then memories, then periods of sleep, then layers falling away and back again, redraping themselves across my psyche. It's possible that none of this has been the right sort of content for a blog, but there you have it: the cat is out of the bag, and I'm writing about it.

My husband’s betrayal of our marriage, of me, left me reeling, dazed, and reaching out for something real. The life I had poured my heart into turned out to be a kind of mirage, and the love I had for my husband had been leaking out for years into the pretend universe, that I mistook for real, until I awoke one day to find that I had nearly bled out.

In my unsteady state I found someone who I loved, impossible as it seems, fearlessly.

But there were clues. When he said about my ex-husband’s affair, “You can’t help who you fall in love with,” I should have run like hell. Or at the very least, probed, “What do you mean? You mean if you’re married to someone it’s not a permanent decision? You mean the vows you take are only good for the good times when you’re “in love”? You mean that love isn’t a decision and a behavior – it’s just an unpredictable emotion that sweeps over a person and disencumbers them of their word and their family?”

“What a terrible ax to have hanging over your head for two years,” someone said to me the other day. Yes. It threw a very long shadow.

My sister sent me the lyrics to Southern Cross by Crosby Stills and Nash, and in doing so she was pointing out this man, this writer, who was saying he was sailing all around the world to find this woman/girl who believed that love can endure. Well, that's what I believed. I loved my ex-boyfriend, and I loved x-man. And it was that enduring love that broke my heart and my brain. It was the way I love, the passion and the commitment and the unconditional faith I had in that love, that undid me. That undoing--the fact of my ability to love that way--will also be my salvation.