A Mind and a Body Walked into a Bar...
I am quiet today, and so tired I lay on the floor of my father’s apartment and fell asleep while waiting for him. I felt like a spider tapped into my being and sucked out all of my insides. This sounds terrible when I say it, but the feeling I had wasn’t one I could easily name. I felt like a bell that had not been struck or a baby sleeping.
So as not to ruin the experience, I had to keep reminding myself not to make stories out of my body’s feelings. Stories would say things like, Oh, no! A spider sucked out your insides! You’re empty! You’re dead! You’re in trouble! If I make stories to narrate my body’s experiences, I am labelling a current feeling with something I recognize from my past. This means stories keep me from being me in the now, and since the only time that exists is now, the stories keep me from being me. I used to think stories were the only way I could know if I was okay or not, but now I’m seeing that stories are things my head creates, and if one of my core stories that I believe is that I’m not lovable or good enough, then isn’t that proof enough my story-making machine is super fucked up?
My head is the People Magazine of my life. Anything to create a little drama.
I felt peaceful on my father’s floor.
The irony is that I’m waiting for blood results from the doctor because I have what looks like the telling bullseye of a tick bite, but the reddish ring around the red area is incomplete, and I never actually even had to pull a tick off my skin. Maybe a spider did bite me! My arm is sore and hard to lift. I feel like I smashed my shoulder into something, but I have no memory of this. The more I think about writing, the less I can remember what I did that morning or the day before. It’s like my brain says, Who cares what you just did? It’s over! We’re here now! I’ve been to urgent care twice this week already because of this bite and because of the poison ivy that is on my face, my arms, my belly, and my ankles. I try to make the nurses and doctors laugh while I’m there so they won’t think I’m an annoying paranoic who can’t bear a little itch and who is afraid of how bad Lyme can be.
There is a kind of leafy green vine here that wraps itself around telephone poles and trees and anything else it can get its little green hands on. I think it was brought over from Asia to stop soil erosion, and if it’s that plant, it can grow a foot a day. The house where I am staying has the forest behind it, and over an acre of lawn front and back. There is an area to the side of the house, four pine trees in a row, that was something out of Rapunzel. The vines were high up in the trees, and the ground was covered with the vines and various other leafy weeds, including poison ivy. I decided to clear it so I didn’t have to sit down and write. It took three days. It was wonderful to only think about roots and pulling and cutting and getting the ground clear enough to rake sort of smooth. I wore gloves and pants and a long-sleeve shirt and boots.
Poison ivy, apparently, doesn’t care what you are wearing.
Every day I think, This is the day my father is going to die. I’m so afraid he will die in a way that is not gentle. He wants to live another three years to get to 90, and then maybe another ten to get to 100. He’s down to 137 pounds and he’s six feet something. He thinks he can send emails on his home phone. He sleeps until the afternoon and then feels terrible about not getting more done. When he dies, I’ll never ever go to Exeter, New Hampshire, again to visit my parents. I’ll never have a dad again. I’m worried he’ll die tomorrow. I’m worried he’ll live another few years.
Every time I go to visit him, I feel one way in the car during the drive and another way as soon as I see him. I go from hopeful and open-hearted to uncomfortable and tense. It’s like my vision of my father are two transparencies slightly off each other—I have a picture in my head of what my father is like, what I’m like with him, and then under that is the picture of how we actually are. The first picture of my dad is one that could have been constructed by a 6-year-old girl—handsome, quiet, loving dad and sweet me—and every time I’m faced with the reality of what it’s like to be with him, I’m disappointed in myself, and surprised by how hard it is to be with him. We have so little in common—he loves politics and I love feelings. I go into mask mode and wait to leave so I can love him like daughters love their fathers in books and movies.
No wonder I keep falling asleep during the day. I’m living two lives at once. The mask life and the real life. I so badly want to be a girl who loves her father and feels able to be herself around him and not a little sick to her stomach always. I want it to feel…better.
My poison ivy rash is telling me to be here. It’s is making me so uncomfortable. My rash isn’t letting me ignore my body. I’m here, my body is saying. Pay attention to me. Be here. I need you to be with me. My body and my mind want to show up for my father. I want to keep trying. Sometimes when you put a key in a lock, the lock won’t turn, but if you keep trying, it clicks.
