march, apray, junely

These three pieces of writing exist primarily thanks to Rachael. During the first few weeks of the initial pandemic lockdown, she asked me if I would write something for a project she was working on and I was honored to do so. This ended up becoming march.

Surprisingly proud of what I had composed for her project, apray and junely eventually followed as ongoing reflections of my evolving mental, emotional and psychological states while quarantining, unemployed and alone, in someone else’s home.

Before you get ahead of yourself in reading and responding to these, know that I’m okay. I’m okay as any of us can be right now. I exist. That is enough.

march

I wake up under someone else’s roof, in someone else’s bed, every morning.
I toss and tumble between someone else’s sheets. I stretch and sprawl on someone else’s mat. I stand solemnly in their shower, water cascading down my neck and shoulders, as I cradle my weary head.

I exhale and make my way downstairs, where the coffee drips and the cereal pours. I take a sip. I spoon a bite. I open my computer and the day begins.

I’ve been in perpetual motion these past three years — over a hundred thousand miles across this country and globe. Home has been whatever I could carry and wherever I lay my head at night. I’ve seen so much of the world that I can humbly acknowledge, “I know nothing.”

Now, I am stopped, stuck passing my days at someone else’s dining room table, my evenings on someone else’s living room couch — they are in the same room. Two steps separate my daily existence. These days, I traverse mega bites instead of miles, trying to stay connected with everywhere, everything and everyone I’ve come to know, through a 13.3 inch screen. My eyes strain. I am fatigued.

But spring is here. I’m reminded that the calm wind, which catches me on days that are warm enough to reflect from the balcony, has traveled the world, as have the birds whose wings it carries. They sing on the branches of trees that surround and I sit here, gently listening to the stories they tell. I’ll be at home again soon.

apray

I’ve been going to bed with the birds lately.
I routinely mumble “goodnight”, as they melodically chirp back “good morning”.

It’s 4am right now. It seems like its always 4am or it’s about to be or it just was. I feel the pain behind my eyes has become persistent as they strain to adjust to my phone screen after I close my computer nightly.

You see, I’m still not supposed to be here right now, and the insomnia comes easy in that purgatory of where I am and where I should be. I’m stuck at some interdimensional rest stop, trying to hitch a ride back to reality, but no one is offering.

So, my sleep has been precarious these past few months. It began the night that I first lost someone to this era, someone who moved worlds and made me feel like I could one day do the same. I stood in the shower at 1:30am that night, shaking, cycling between vicious crying and panic attacks, as I tried to wash the feeling of unexpected loss and misery away.

A few days later, the paranoia set in. I’ve always been afraid of the dark, the one that creeps behind me as I methodically turn off the lights, while I retreat to bed at night. And there were two weeks straight where I couldn’t bring myself to face the mirror, as I brushed my teeth before bed, for the irrational fear of Candy Man emerging from the shower behind me.

I took acid for the first time a few months prior. Is that a metaphor? Sure, but when the familiar hallucinations began, I knew that I was no longer paranoid. With my retinas as the projectors, the backs of my eyelids became the screen. My trauma-induced mind projected a collage of images which both haunted and delighted, and when I would open them, they would flood into the dark room before me as a vivid, brilliant flash of evanescent, yellowish light. This repeated until I began to mistake those projections for dawn peering through the bedroom skylight.

Then came the dreams. The lucid, fevered dreams which I could no longer consciously discern between fantasy and reality. More than once, I woke up and rolled over, just to wonder why the person I had made love to all night wasn’t in bed next to me. When the truth was that she was never there.

Or maybe she was insomnia, and now she’s decided to stay. The one thing all of those women had in common was that they had caused me past trauma or we had endured trauma together. I don’t know how we got here, but the large skylight glows a gradient, luminescent blue now. Someone just closed their car door outside. I assume they’re beginning their day, along with the birds. I will finally end mine.

Good mourning.

junely

By the time I could spread my wings again, I had forgotten how to fly. Try as I might, I couldn’t seem to catch the breeze. It was still there, but the world had changed. People still gathered. The sun still shined and I know the wind could still carry me. But it had changed. I had changed. We had changed. Why did it seem as though everything was trying to convince us that it hadn’t?

Thinking back, I remember when I decided to place a Do Not Resuscitate label on what remained of my ego and settled in, submitting to this simulation.

<<press play>>

Our government reopened the economy too early, determining that our livelihoods were more important than our lives, and then George Floyd died, somehow rustling up the angst of an apathetic majority to decry and denounce racism. I knew it was because we couldn’t look away for once; I refused to close my eyes. I watched the world begin to deceive and destroy itself through screens, inside of four walls, under one roof , alone— just me stuck inside some digitally-connected cage. I started etching the days on the wall with a pick I had fashioned out of an old spoon from the cafeteria. My mental health deteriorated and I left it by the wayside when it became too much of a burden to carry.

The things that had typically made me whole — meandering exploration and human connection — were taken away from me. I was left with myself, which is something that I had spent my entire life not believing was enough. To cope, I had always centered the struggles of others over my own. I came to understand this as societal empathy; that’s what I defaulted to in this moment. My body became a pin cushion for the world’s pain and, as it became too much to bare, I replaced my internal organs with plush cotton to prevent myself from feeling it too deeply.

My mind struggled to retain the reality that this wasn’t some kind of simulation. The bulb in my projectors began to flicker and glitch. They started superimposing chromatic, phantom images of the distant, wondrous and even benign places where I had been and seen, on the walls of my cage. My waning mental fortitude stayed the solitary, captivated audience member. The images were momentary, yet unmistakable. I felt like I would never see the places they depicted again — they faded. My subconscious was panicking, trying desperately to claw its way back up some gravelly incline to what I was leaving behind.

As spring turned to summer, the cage transformed into a boat. I was free to see and experience the world, but I was adrift. I could no longer see the shore. I had waded too far out and been gone too long. I wanted to forfeit. Maybe I took this too seriously. In week nine, a friend patted me on the back on a walk — it was the first time I had had human contact since an incidental finger collision in week three and a shoe tap in week two — I shuddered and withdrew, unsure of how to respond.

If dying were easy, I would not be here today.

<<press stop>>

If dying were easy, I would not have made it through these past months, but at least I’ve come to appreciate the feeling of a calm, cooling breeze on my bare skin as sit by the window, while I make it through this menial existence.

I took a trip to rural Vermont as June turned to July and did ‘shrooms. That’s not a metaphor. I spent thirty minutes sitting at a picnic bench communing with a fly. I felt like the world made sense for the first time in forever. I then let my mind run free in the forest for hours, and found myself just where I had left me.