Still around

I just wanted to pop up and wave so y’all don’t think I’m dead.

I have trouble writing, or finishing writing anyway. The drafts folder is total chaos. That I could write at all last summer was, in hindsight, miraculous. Lately I feel like Sam Bell in Moon at the end of his shift — isolated, broken apart, not really supposed to be here, doing his best to cope with an ongoing existential crisis, most communication is with a machine. When does my new, capable clone emerge, one that gets me and won’t get frustrated if I ask for a complicated smoothie, who will make it a double and split it?

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

The gravity of now is hard to process and damn near impossible to convey. Most writing is about the wildlife in the neighborhood, or watching cats leap around the yard as the leaves fly out from the trees, because I don’t want to be a downer. My drafts folder is full of shit like:

“Under the streetlight, possum neighbors, drifter raccoons, community cats shuffle deep within lush straggler daisy clumps, hunt horned lizards, slugs, beetles, tiny brown snakes, snacking on excessive acorns from worried, summer-sun-baked oaks, their children will plant forests, the forests will shelter them.”

That sort of thing. I feel like my brain got broken and is now gluing itself back together weird, but it’s life, I guess I’ll do my best. Every evening the heaviness of the day accumulates in my blood. I feel poisoned. How am I supposed to do a job or write regularly or make a living when I’m too tired to tidy up my workspace? I can’t hustle, stick with it, go for it, all I can do is barely hang in there.

Those are all the office posters I can think of at the moment. I only visited offices, like every kitchen manager, teacher, and at least one professor a year has the clipping or poster or t-shirt of Gary Larson’s The Far Side’s “Why the Dinosaurs Went Extinct” comic (they were SMOKING!), and the one about the mountains ahead and the grain of sand in my shoe. See? It’s all a mess up there, I feel compelled to run away to the woods and sit on a mountain until I’m dead, just watching the sky change.

It’s a wave. This is a deep trough, down to the sea floor, colorful outlines of neon sea creatures surround me, Web MD suggests the bends. My shoulders hurt from typing, I have vertigo, nausea, the spins, or nothing to say. The sentences about long covid are repetitive, the ones I read, the ones I write, the newsletters I habitually delete because I’m still sick either way and have been that way for almost four years, one or two of which I barely remember. Long covid consumes my life in the background as I struggle to do normal things and get stronger. I don’t want to give it more energy than it has taken. Does anyone really know how to fix broken mitochondria? Is my unruly immune system salvageable?

I quit chasing cures in favor of comfort, but spicy tea and Tiger Balm have their limits. “No cure, just treatment,” is so hard for family to understand. I doubt they believe me and they have so much on their plates I don’t want to push it. Cancer can be cut out or radiated if caught in time and there are very promising new treatments for liquid cancers. Kidney stones can be fractured and (painfully) pissed away, bad vision can be corrected, a bad tooth can be pulled, and so many ailments can be prevented or treated until they are gone or the patient dies. With long covid, the doctor tries to hide a pained expression, suggests the very things you’re already doing, shrugs, and says “good luck?” A sleepy person who is reserving energy for the rolling apocalypse is not going to press too hard, what is there to say? Many of us have used so much of our remaining strength to read medical journals about chronic illness, post viral conditions, long covid, HIV/AIDS, looking for anything that will bring us back into the world before we die, and most of what we read about is inaccessible or we are already trying it. Honestly after doomscrolling and binging news I am in no hurry to re-enter the heartbreaking pain of the world with inept oligarchs handling the most horrific events with no soul or compassion. I don’t know why I am shocked that a country that allowed a pandemic to rage through the population, downplaying severity when it threatened the economy, is now encouraging and supplying genocide and silencing those who oppose it.

Catching up on movies I never got around to watching is probably helping my perspective somewhat. This is why we have art I guess, to challenge and strengthen us when we are grasping for reason. I rarely see the end of a movie the same day as the beginning but that can’t be helped. I don’t want to sleep in the middle of a movie, I become sleep, I embody sleep, sleep is me, and in the background, angels wander a bombed out city, listening to the thoughts of everyday people in a language I never studied.

My heroes are no longer the warriors and kings … but the things of peace … But no one has so far succeeded in singing an epic of peace. What is wrong with peace that its inspiration doesn’t endure … and that its story is hardly told?

Curt Bois as Homer, the storyteller of humanity, Wings of Desire

I may live like this for decades but it feels like death is chuckling at my efforts, patiently knitting shrouds in the corner of the room. If that’s the case, I want to focus on something joyful so Death and I can share a laugh at my attempts to gather strength. I prepared the ground for wildflowers, but crashed again after planting half a pound of locally sourced shade-friendly wildflowers for next Spring to feed wildlife and pollinators. The next three days I occasionally woke up to feed cats and perform the ever-shifting health regimen, but mostly slept. If the flowers live up to their hype, if they touch soil and get rained on a few times before winter, it will be so beautiful.

May there be better, more clear-headed days ahead, full of flowers and joy.