fall around
appointments, bad apples, and the twilight zone.
Here’s the quick of it: I go to the doctor, I go to a different doctor, I go to therapy and wonder if I should just quit altogether because I don’t really find it useful. I try to find a psychiatrist and am treated to an incessant amount of emailing back and forth. One of the doctors strips me and wraps me in a wet sheet and puts me to bed, then touches my head as we wait for my body to warm the sheet up. I spend the entire time thinking about ice mummies. The receptionist for the other doctor tells me that she sees me traveling abroad because my soul is sparkling— in Italy, she says, sipping a coffee in the sunshine. I tell her that I don’t mix well with caffeine. Hot chocolate, then, she says, sitting in a cafe with a pastry. She says more after that but I’ve already left the building at that point.
I get really good at Sudoku and then promptly abandon it because I don’t want to spend more time on my phone. I talk to people and sometimes they talk back. I talk to myself even more, singing in the shower or while doing the dishes (as long as nobody else is around). I draw my little shapes. I make dolls to protect me from evil. I listen to music on a busted iPod. I read a few books. I watch several movies of varying quality; most of them are horror films, in honor of October. I cut off two centimeters of hair because my ends were dead and I don’t cry. I don’t cry at any point, actually. I do the laundry. I clean my room. I discover that my skin clears up when I use a moisturizer, which seems obvious, but genuinely didn’t occur to me until recently. I keep going to bed with wet hair. I do it so many times that it becomes a running joke in my diary. I become the type of person who has running jokes in their diary.
I fall into a routine. It’s easy to do, especially now that it’s autumn. Autumn makes me good. Autumn makes me a sweet girl. Doctor No. 1 tells me that if the ice mummy treatment doesn’t work, they’re going to stick a needle into my neck. Doctor No. 2 tells me that I’m improving because my breathing has gone from nonexistent to shallow. The weather gets colder and wetter. The sun goes down earlier. I go walking in the nighttime, wearing the wrong clothes and carrying only a cassette player. Sometimes I wonder if my behavior means that I want to die or be hurt but I dismiss the notion. Sometimes I wish that I had spent my teenage years differently, no bathrooms or dark underpasses, even though I know the thread I’m pulling goes back much further. I got my head slammed in a car door when I was two and my parents thought I died. That’s probably where it went wrong.
Yes I grind my teeth. Yes I bite myself at night. I try to find work but there’s no work; I try to sleep and find that I can’t. Stupid motherfucking bullshit hell-bound dumbass little kamikaze routine. It occurs to me that it might be fun to feel something different than the way I always feel, but the idea frightens me so I avoid it. When I remember that I can’t open my mouth all the way without pain because my jaw doesn’t work right— I think I’ve been hit upside the head too many times for that— I open my mouth over and over just to feel the bones snap. It’s almost 3 a.m. right now and I’m sitting in bed with my hands pressed below my ears so I can feel the joints crunch. And it is a crunch. It’s fucking loud. It’s loud enough that I think other people can hear me breaking myself, but that idea also frightens me, so I avoid it, too. I just sit in my room and crack my mouth open. It’s the only thing I ever do.
On the first rainy day of the season, I skip one of my various appointments. It’s less about the rain and more about not wanting to explain why there are bruises on my arm, but the rain is still part of it— I sometimes get the feeling that some things are untouchable, not out of fear but out of reverence, and the day seems sacrosanct. So I don’t go. I say I have a migraine and I spend an hour doing nothing but looking out the window and listening to Brian Eno. Because I can. Because I want to. Because a pocket of space is opening around me, and all motion within it plays out in half time, and any attempt at speaking will fail. I’ve tried before and it’s not pretty. Staying in suspension is the best option available.
I’m watching the apple tree in the neighbors’ yard. It’s been dying since I was a kid, positively crawling with lichen and rot. You can hear the rats running up and down the branches in the autumn. And it is autumn now, so hello, rats. The neighbors are going to cut it down eventually, but for now, shining apples sit on the branches, diseased before they even ripen. Rain slides over the open sores on their skins. The light turns the water into diamonds. I could sit here for hours, just watching the water collect and then move on. It’s my favorite type of ritualism because I can know what space I occupy and I know what space occupies me. This— the rain-watching, the apples, the Brian Eno— is doing more for me than any conversation or drug or medication has. I’m suspended. And in suspension, in a place where words are already thick and clouded, it would be even more like pulling teeth than usual. I spare everyone from suffering; I watch the rain and the apples instead.
(When my cassette tape decides to end, I calmly rewind it and it doesn’t even phase me. I have to rewind it because only side A is Brian Eno. But I’m calm about it. See? No suffering. I’m downright fucking enlightened.)
An apple hits the ground with a gunshot crack. Jaundiced pulp splatters everywhere. From the second story window, it looks enough like pus for the comparison to come to mind. And the sound hurts— it makes it through my bubble and scrapes me. Oh well. All things end. I knew it would happen at some point.
Sometimes things come true for me, so when I said to myself this Monday that the week was going to be violent, I knew I was going to be right. It has been. Not that much blood, but enough. Not that much yelling, but enough. Weird dreams. Disquieted rooms. It’s a bitter satisfaction, you know. The satisfaction isn’t nearly bitter enough for me to wish I had been wrong, because confirmation is almost always better than a good thing— most people want to be right more than they want to feel something beautiful. Nothing feels better than I told you so. And I told you that the week would be violent, and it was, and the little flecks of tooth-mark bruises on my arm haven’t even begun to heal because I’ve been topping them up in my sleep every night. I don’t even really have a choice in it. I’ve tried long sleeves and taping my mouth shut but I always end up biting myself regardless. So take that. I win. Even when I lose, I win. That’s because everything that can save me is also something that can completely undo me, and that aforementioned everything has a tendency of dragging me kicking and screaming by the hair. But you already knew that.
I’ve got The Twilight Zone on because (aside from cracking my jaw) I have nothing else to do. It’s dreary out, cloudy and strangely warm, and it’s making me even more lethargic than usual— my limp body, my broken freezer rattling to the side, my layers of blankets. Everyone’s got their lights on despite it barely being past noon. You can look up and down the block and see all the windows lit up yellow. Porch lights, living room lamps, bedrooms. There’s a collective desire in the neighborhood to ward off some sort of evil that isn’t even there, not at this time of day. We are stupid and we are beautiful and I don’t think that whatever we’re doing is working.
An advertisement for dog medication is playing on the television. Side effects include: cancer, anorexia, internal bleeding, vomiting, seizures, aggression, disorientation, urinary and fecal incontinence, liver failure, kidney failure, skin disease, muscle spasms, excessive saliva, death. Picture of an excited bulldog. Picture of a golden retriever frolicking through a field. It then cuts back to the episode’s protagonist as he attempts to saw off a talking doll’s head. When they pan to the doll, she’s right where the retriever from the commercial used to be. For a moment, time intersects with itself and one image takes the place of the other— the doll awkwardly clambers through the field and the man attempts to kill the smiling dog. It’s odd enough to strike me as funny.
The first time I watched this episode was in eighth grade English class, when we were doing a unit on horror. It was October then, too. My girlfriend at the time dug her fingernails into my arm so hard that I started bleeding. The bruises lasted for weeks. I’m still not sure she was actually as scared as she was acting. Back on screen: my name is Talky Tina, the doll says, and I don’t forgive you. I like the soundtrack here. A lack of forgiveness sounds like a flourish on the harp with a little bit of celesta and bass clarinet. It’s nice because I’ve always imagined that holding a grudge has a similar feeling— the delicacy, the drama, the simmering mellowness; it’s the shadow of the doubt in the valley of death.
The man dies in the end. Good. Fuck him. You better be nice to me, says Talky Tina. Yeah. You better be nice. I think my head is all scattered into pieces. Maybe I’m in the Twilight Zone. So what’s the jab— aliens? A doppelganger? It’s probably one of those episodes that’s got a big lesson about the faults of humanity or something. I wouldn’t blame them. I cooked up this slab of meat the other day and remembered myself, remembered what I really look like. Leather and guts and tiny straws of blood. If I worked at a butcher’s, I would wrap the meat with blue-vein twine to make other people remember, too. Surely that’s a notion that belongs in the Twilight Zone. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a woman in the show that wasn’t blonde and false-eyelashed, though, so I’m probably safe. Probably.
Back on screen: an advertisement for Los Angeles. Jesus, is it that bad? That Los Angeles, of all places, needs to advertise for tourists? It’s a montage of Disney, people skateboarding, Randy Newman’s star on the walk of fame. It looks next to nothing like the city I’m familiar with. Frankly, it’s a little disturbing. I try to run my hand through my hair but I run out of hair sooner than I expected and this, too, is disturbing. Maybe this really is the Twilight Zone.
I feel it. I can understand it. The week has been violent, so I can almost expect it, too. I look out the window at the neighbors’ house and I can see that they have every single light turned on, even though there aren’t nearly enough people to occupy all the lit rooms. My leg goes numb. Without thinking, I turn on the lamp beside the couch. It’s 1 p.m. The sky is bright. But I feel it. My limp body. My broken freezer. My layers of blankets. I think the monsters are due on Maple Street. I think that if I really tried, I could be capable of crying right now.
I push for tears. None come. That’s also expected. Bereft of options, I roll over and go to sleep. It’s just terrible. It’s all just terrible.