dailyness for beginners

night vision.

I open my notes app, unsure of what I might write, and waiting for me is just one line I left there the other night: deodorant on my bikini line, I think this is the kind of honesty I am talking about, but I'm not sure if that's true. I accidentally reached for the wrong yet similarly shaped toiletry and ended up using deodorant on my bikini line a few weeks ago. I sent a text to a friend about it because it was ridiculous, and it made me laugh. It begged to be documented somewhere—a confession on the absurdity of a middle-aged woman doing too many things at once during a time in her life where everything is absurd. Opaque. Hard. Confusing. Practically unrecognizable. Awake and also asleep at the same time. A time when she's an alien even to herself. I didn't even realize I was coating my bikini line in deodorant until I used it and placed it back on the shelf. At the time, I think this must be symbolic of something pathetic or perhaps I'm not even living my life anymore, just a ghost in the bathroom, the kitchen, and in the shower. I am awake, not to what's in front of me, but to what's unveiling inside me. It's the strangest thing. Awake for the nightmare to find it's not really a nightmare; it's just composting your life in real time. It's the second day in a row that laying in bed in the middle of the day and watching TV is like unwrapping a giant gift. It's luxurious to lie in bed and watch TV, but it's also devastating and disorienting. I lay in bed in a half cry and wonder what else I should be doing, the list is impressive and undone. I look for jewelry made from stones found in the earth that I won't buy, but consider while adding them to my cart that maybe they hold the magical power I need to patch myself back together. All of this is true. Yesterday, whenever I stood up, I felt like I would fall down. I tell Fonz to put me on the list of things important to him daily, like exercise. I am having a hard time finishing anything. When I remember what I haven't done, I feel sick to my stomach or like I'm falling through the sky. My body drops is all I know. It's already one thirty in the afternoon, and I can't really make a satisfying tally of anything I've accomplished today. This always makes me feel uneasy. I like to have done many things that mean something by ten in the morning. But I haven't done much. Unless you count helping Fonz sign up for a clinical trial for his cancer before rushing the girls into the car to take them to school and arriving with one minute before the second bell rings to spare. Unless you count waking up at a little before six and lighting a candle while quietly praying for clarity or a connection to something, hopefully, my creativity, and then doing yoga and making breakfast and cleaning up breakfast and I'm not sure what else, but I know I forgot something because I always do. On our way to school, the girls are deep in conversation in the backseat for most of the ride. They hold each other's hands, and they hold mine. Before I'm even back to my car, Fonz has called twice to update me on the clinical trial orbiting his remission. I also got back into bed after taking a walk and fell asleep after watching a few episodes of a show I've already seen, but it gets better with age. I cried a little bit, too. I picked up an actual book, like in my hands, to read instead of another one I am almost finished with about addiction on my Kindle. And the one I am listening to on an app on my phone about domestic abuse, which was recently made into a movie that I can tell I will hate. I listen to it while assembling a bookshelf because the one I had put together a couple of months ago collapsed beneath its weight over the weekend. It was starting to look like a body leaning against the wall of my office, sliding onto the floor like it had been shot. The audio book is ok, I guess; I haven't been able to read fiction in about eighteen months, so there's that. I am relieved that I can still use my imagination, and I think the book version is likely better than the movie, but it's not great. I feel bad that this is my opinion, particularly because it's so popular and confirms that I never seem to want to do what other people are doing or like what others like. I'm not a misanthrope. Maybe it would be easier if I was. I look up, What's the opposite of a misanthrope? on my phone, expecting to see an empath. But I find the word believer instead. This opens a little window to a room in my heart that hasn't had much light for a while. A poem of some kind, like a spider web, spins against the dropping light of September. When I listened to cassette tapes when I was young, because I grew up in the eighties, I always knew all the words of the B-side songs because I always liked them better. This isn't something I am proud of; in fact, I think this part of me has made some things in life harder than they needed to be. From bed, I volunteer for something at my daughter's school. I added my name to a spreadsheet cell where I presumably commit myself to some consistency as though I know what I am doing on Wednesdays from ten twenty five until eleven fifteen forevermore. Last year, I spent that time waiting for Fonz in oncology while he got chemo. I list this all out as though anyone is keeping score. But aren't they? Aren't I? I don't know why I continue to search for permission to melt into something new. I’ve been feeling like Medusa lately. I think of her often. She’s with me walking down the street. At first, she’s the most misunderstood version of her. The one where if you look into her eyes, you turn to stone. My brother read a series of books or played a video game with this version at the center - wielding all kinds of malefic power - when we were kids. She symbolized some hideous version of femininity; the kind of oozing ugly reserved for the crone, another misunderstood force of nature and womanhood. Medusa fascinated me then. She returns to me in the days coming home from Fonz’s stem cell transplant. When you could see my pain and rage and confusion and displaced power approaching from any distance. Here she comes; look away or you’ll turn to stone. There are snakes coming from her head. A beast. A destructive force. Broken. Vengeful. And for fuck sake, don’t ask her how she is doing. To look at her is to take in her suffering. The beauty of wreckage. The humanity. Your own. The truth that we cannot escape the part where we must face something horrifying and make something else of it. Or disappear into it. Maybe both. How in this remaking, this gathering and alchemizing of raw and unruly materials, that cannot be set to a clock, held to any plan, and certainly don’t seem containable, you first let some precious parts of yourself die a little. As in, snakes are coming from your head where hair used to be. But if you really look in my eyes you won’t turn to stone, you’ll just see what we missed about Medusa in the first place. It’s something about how hard it is to look at suffering and accept that it is part of living. Something about the cruelty of calling a woman a crone rather than exalting her bravery for being alive through loss again and again. Something inside my body weighs more than it used to. I lay down a lot and look up things on my phone like, why am I so tired all the time after a stressful year? The term crisis fatigue pops up. Some other similar phrases gather beneath it, like trauma fatigue, depression, and anxiety. All of these seem to fit the profile, depending on which side I am looking at. Or the time of day. The point is, I don’t feel like a caterpillar or a butterfly, most of of the time I feel more like Medusa. I think about the efficacy of taking medication or eating mushrooms; both would require me to stand up and move around at some point, which almost immediately makes them not what I want to do next. Yesterday, I cried to Fonz. But I still haven't told him that I have a recurring dream where I’m searching for him because I want to tell him I miss him. In real life, we’ve known each other since we were fourteen, maybe fifteen. I used to know exactly how long, but I don’t anymore. Lifetimes, I’m sure. In the dream, I also don’t want to tell him that I miss him, as though the longing to tell him is what I am after. Keep me there in the place before anything else happens. Because it will. On a walk in the redwoods with a friend, we liken this to addiction. We liken the longing to something Godlike - a liminal energy that spans two territories where you must be one or the other, but not both. I am both. I am destroyed and new. Like one of those broken dolls brought back to life with stitches and scars and snakes pulled up in a ponytail on the top of my head. But in the dream, it's the feeling of searching that I am chasing. It's almost as if there is a me, a lucid presence, that makes a home out of nuance. Has made an entire life of it. Does better navigating in the dark in the middle of the night than during the day. The dreams remind me of when we were younger and how he would show up places, and no matter what was happening earlier or who I was with, we were pulled together across it all. Like magnets. Like gravity. Luna wakes up at three and asks me to lie with her. We hold hands down the hallway, and I get into her bed. She tells me about her nightmare in fine detail. It's almost like she's reading it off a script. It's so fleshed out. Her voice is loud, and she annunciates like it's the middle of the day, not the middle of the night, when most conversations occur in a whisper. We fall asleep, and when I wake up next to her at five, my back doesn't hurt like when I wake up in my bed. I spend the rest of the day wondering what that might mean if anything at all.