reel around
lists and entries from journals, the notes app, etc. from october 16th to november 5th.
Entry titled “October”, 11/5/2024, 3:11 p.m. In a notebook.
I don’t actually remember October. Everything but flashes of dreams I had is lost to me. If I was awake, I had not woken. My body must have moved of its own accord, legs like clockwork, to the bathroom or kitchen or back up the stairs. The dreams were closer to life than the dream I was living— worlds unraveled inside me, dressed in colors so rich it hurt my mouth to look at them. It was an aching under the tongue to see red. I unearthed the paracosms of my childhood from necessity or boredom or both, and now everything I dreamed in October is stuck inside that fantasy world, and the real things that happened in October are gone with the wind. A lot of my life went similarly, I think. I’ve started to realize that I can hardly remember anything about myself or the things that have happened to me. I got less smart within myself, walking into the canyons and voids that sit in the place of memories. I didn’t realize there were so many holes until just now. And not everything is lost, I’ve still got a good chunk of my life under my belt, but I can typically only remember the aftermath of events. Like the recollection of a recollection. It feels like a game of telephone. I don’t feel firm in my mind.
It’s a day, today. Nothing has happened yet even though things will— decisions between evil or the lesser evil, mainly— and I can’t deny my own dread. I don’t want to think about it. It’s out of my hands now. I will bear whatever comes with grace. I have the fortune of being able to bear whatever comes with grace.
I think I’m lucky. I think I’m very lucky. It’s a bit scary to be missing yourself like that, but I still think I’m lucky. People around me pick up my pieces and tell it back to me. I can make some inferences by whatever I was writing about at the time, in journals or short stories or poems. I can make some inferences by whatever I wasn’t writing about. The memories I do have slot into place where they’re needed. The holes that remain are covered by my body. Even though my brain had the blessing of forgetting, something had to remember it for me, and so I carry that pain somewhere on me like a loaded gun. Joints, bones, muscles, brain fog, fatigue. My main clue to knowing that something happened to me is that I’m carrying unsourced hurt, and hurt doesn’t come without a source.
I’m trying to follow the path back. I’m starting with October, but it doesn’t make much sense. I know things happened because my mother told me, and even if she didn’t, I’m having new nightmares lately, but none of what I wrote makes much sense and that’s my main source. It’s just gone. I said it before, didn’t I? I wasn’t awake.
Untitled entry, 11/2/2024, 10:02 p.m. In the notes app.
Sitting on the bench on the top of a hill and staring at the lights below, in the metropolitan area at the bottom of it. See the sparkle between the high rises. Sleeping people. It's late out by now, real late. Surely I'll die in a moment here. Murder or heart attack or aneurysm or the earth swallowing me whole. And all the tiny cars like ants. Flashing blue of a stationary cop car. Red glowing store signs. The streets are headlight gold, blurring together into smooth nothing. Primary colors in sugar specks. Astigmatic lines stretch like ballerinas. It's all blurring together. The noise in my head slides in and out. The tiny cars are blurred. The wide streets are blurred. When I tilt my head up to the sky, seeking out something colder and deader, I see that the stars are also blurred and realize, somewhat shamefully, that I'm on the verge of tears. And the entire world seems to shake in its electric boots. Praises be.
Entry titled “Untitled”, 10/24/2024, 11:13 p.m. In a notebook.
No, I didn’t like it at all. No, no I didn’t. Not one bit. Launch myself to the wind, to the birds, to the ocean. Wander the earth in a slumber until I crumble and am absolved into the earth. Fuck the cities as the towns and the single houses away from everywhere. Kill everything dead. I haven’t slept yet and I’m not sure I want to. Nightmares, you know. Burn it all down to the ground.
They had to do both arms, by the way. Eleven vials of blood. Bad news. Bad luck wind. Took the love right out of me. Two green pennies and a curse on the body. I have nothing to say because I was asleep, but you know that already. I woke up briefly right before they put the needle in my arm. Didn’t cry. Couldn’t move much because I had enough benzodiazepines in my system to make sure I wouldn’t end up hurting anyone again. Shook like a sick dog. Clenched my jaw so hard I think I cracked a fucking molar. Then I went under again and I’m not sure I actually woke up. I was under the hill and it wasn’t even my fault. But kill them all dead while we’re at it. Wreck the world. I’m blind to anything but forcing understanding. It’s all going to happen anyways. It’s happening to everybody.
Entry titled “Kitten”, 10/18/2024, 1:24 a.m. In a notebook.
I wish I had access to music, to the songs I want to hear right now. These days I tend to get nervous around prescription drugs— the good shit— and I’m in the mood for small mercies. Valium was a bust. Trazedone works the way I thought it would, which is to say that it doesn’t work, not in this particular case. We’ve moved onto Xanax. I appreciate its palindromic nature despite my deep distrust of it. Last time I took Xanax it ended badly, so I don’t got much faith in this round, but I took half of one ten minutes ago to try and adjust myself back into it. There’s not many pills left— not much room for experimentation. It’s my curse to bear. Not many people like being unprepared, but some crave preparation more than others. Call it anxiety or neurosis or being too left-brained. I want to know as much as I fucking can, as soon as possible. And while I would much prefer a dossier from some omniscient being that’ll tell me what will happen, cutting a pill in half and taking it is the only way I’ll know, so down the hatch it goes. I don’t want to be fifteen again, but whatever. Cheers to knowledge. Xanax, act two, scene one.
Who knows what’ll happen now that my body’s not all squirrelly and cracked from school bathrooms and parking lots— not that it’s any better now, in the case of reactions, but I guess its better to have a clean slate on a broken machine than a dirty one. Less interference. Broken might not be the word for it, and I know that it’s a taboo of some sort to say you’re broken, but what’s wrong with broken things? I don’t even have to turn my head to see half a dozen things that don’t work the way they should (teacups with chips and chunks missing, books with pages ripped out, clocks that are only right twice a day, dysfunctional MP3 players, cracked tape decks, wobbly tables, etcetera). Broken isn’t so bad. Besides, if everyone’s got a hankering to fix me, I reckon I can reclaim it.
I’ve got a headache building in the crown of my head, like a soft spot got slammed into a door frame a little too hard. You know the feeling? It’s sort of dizzy and saccharine and achy. Like a broken heart. It happened like this the last time, too, but what the Hell— I’m dehydrated and likely malnourished, and it is just past 2 a.m., so I reckon it could be anything. It’s hard to tell anything from anything these days. I’m just hoping I won’t have to end my night with fingers down my throat.
It’s kind of funny. There have been a lot of times in my life where I wanted to die, to be honest. When I was eleven I would sneak down to the kitchen and hold knives against my throat. I knew I wasn’t going to do it, but it was the ecstatic fantasy of birth in death. There were several more times through the years, bleeding out alone on sidewalks and stone-faced in junker cars, where the thought returned. Wrists are for girls. But it was never worse than when I was seventeen and saw a gray kitten in the parking lot of some motel in Eugene. I was new to illness. It came on me fresh. There, at one in the morning in what may very well be Oregon’s dullest city, was a cat who was also new to it. The memory is faint. My own little odyssey of recollection. I know the scrap was missing a good bit of fur on its sides, like it had mange. I know I could see its ribs. I’m not sure if I imagined the slash through the tiny ear or the rheumy eye, but they’re in my head regardless. And It wouldn’t stop crying. We were facing down in the parking lot and it cried and cried and cried. I was just little enough to recognize the grief of being too little, and I couldn’t do jack shit about it. What was there to do? It wouldn’t accept food or water from me because, understandably, it didn’t trust me. I was just passing through. Couldn’t take it with me. So I went back into the motel room and laid in the sterile bed and dug my nails into my palms as hard as I could, and I begged any and every listening deity to just take me and the kitten and get it over with. I wanted absolution. I wanted obsoletion. Young and crying. Story of my life.
None of that matters one lick, though. The point is that I’ve been thinking of that little gray kitten lately. The night was wet and we were both alone. I would put money down on it being dead by now, even though I pray to God it’s been picked up and is now living the good life in some loving home. I don’t think that happened, though, and now I’m just thinking about it. All the “it”s. About the kitten. About how whatever is wrong with me— my breaker, my parasite baby, my Dolores— is probably more in my head than everyone else thinks. Just like a woman, isn’t it. It makes a lady out of me. You never really see men suffer from these internal devourings, do you? How many times can you kick a dog before the damage is permanent?
Here’s the thing. I used to get guilty but now I don’t because I killed the agent of desire. Doing any sort of harm to anyone that didn’t deserve it was enough to put me in bed for weeks, sick to my stomach with shame. Nowadays, it turns out I’m in the 99th percentile for dissociative behaviors. My brain is real strong— it was strong when it forced me sick after making a mistake and it was strong when I cut it all out of me like a tumor. Sometimes, though, the things you think you cut out of yourself were actually just shoved into a dark corner where you couldn’t see it. This affliction is likely my brain fighting back. God forcing atonement. Don’t get religious about it. Little guilts going sanguine and needing to be bled. How many times can you kick yourself before the damage becomes permanent? I don’t need to loathe myself because my body does it for me. I don’t need to be suicidal because my body does it for me. Lucky, lucky girl, still young and still crying.
And now, right on time with the changing of the hour, here comes the rain.
Entry titled “The Hill”, 10/16/2024, 4:13 a.m. In a notebook.
I think I’ve been asleep— I think I closed my eyes sometime last week and perhaps forgot to open them— I think my world has been a dream; fragments of not [illegible, maybe “wholly”?]— I’ve been away, out of here, somewhere outside in a safe place or just so far in that no one could possibly touch me— off wandering under the hill. That’s what my grandmother called it, but she thought I was a devil then her husband then a fairy, so she’s not exactly trustworthy. When I was little I thought maybe they would take me back because I was strange and elderly and knew things I shouldn’t have— many adults grasped me tightly by the arms and asked who told you that in fake-calm before I was old enough to know to keep things to myself. And no one had even told me anything. Their wrath was unjustified; I knew because I saw it and heard it and it turns out that children aren’t supposed to see and hear all the nasty things adults do and say to each other in confidence. You assume a child is confidence (first mistake)— I knew because it was written all over them.
Surely, I thought, something has gone wrong— surely I’m supposed to be somewhere else. Devil, husband, changeling child. I felt acknowledged because I knew she knew I was supposed to be somewhere else. I tried everything to get them to take me back— I prayed, I stepped into every ring of mushrooms I could find, I left out cream and glass beads and ribbons and bells— if only I could catch one, then maybe we could negotiate and they would swap us again and there would be no trouble. When that didn’t work, I said all the rhymes I could to see if anyone would catch on and send me back or burn me at the stake or something, but that also didn’t work, and they just considered me precocious. And I was, but I wasn’t. I was asleep. I’ve been asleep this whole time and they won’t let me wake up. I don’t know what to do. There’s nothing left for me to do. I’ve been dead but I just came back. Made offerings, seductions, begged, stood naked in the moonlight of the backyard to see if I’d be easier to hear. Child body. Tried to plant certain flowers.
(Suddenly I’m remembering that morning glory I grew in the windowsill, how despite my shocking amounts of love and care it only got to bloom once because my mother snapped the stem. It never recovered from being broken. I prayed like a martyr to be saved from a world of mourning glories after that. I don’t think I ever forgave her. Petty, maybe, but I was sure I could see the rot in her. To break a flower, not by accident but intentionally— how could someone be so cruel? How could someone do that? )
But I was never whisked away, so I stayed asleep. Sometimes I rose to the photic zone, clawing at the membrane between me and waking, but mostly I slept in the middle depths. Other times, times like these, I go all the way down to the bottom. I don’t know what oceanographic zone it is. I don’t care. I’m under the hill now. Nobody can get me here, me and Pirate Jenny and the ship in the harbor.
The moon is terribly bright tonight. Almost full. Waxing. Partially obscured by fast-moving cumulus clouds until they scurry past and it can beam down again like a terrible fatty eye through my window. Terrible terrible terrible. The moon is so big and so bright tonight that I had to remember all of it. I didn’t want to, but I did. And I’m too old and straight-mouthed to put stock in any of it, those childhood myths, but I think about it often because to some degree, I do still believe it. Or I love it. If I believed in it I wouldn’t love it, and if I love it I can’t believe in it. Faith and love come separately and stay apart around here. Which is fine— them’s the digs. But I think of it often. Especially when that night-eye rolls lazy around the heavens.
Back under the hill I go. I don’t think I’ll ever come out of it. I know it’s going to kill me. It’s happening to everybody.