5.14.22

Sometimes I think you understand me more than anybody else and that means you don't understand me at all. A few things then, this morning. There's a satisfaction in having a cold, a simplicity I can accept. There's a beginning, middle, and end (for now). Others can worry for you in a clear direction and you can accept their generosity because you won't risk overstaying your welcome (the cold will leave eventually, right?). The imperative is clear: rest and let the water run into you and through you. I am a cracked bowl, leaking everywhere (I was designed so). People ask me if I need help so I can admit I do. (I always have needed help, will always need it.) I cancel all of my plans with a secret elation. (Finally, a reason for retreat that can be forgiven.) Finally, I am in the theatre of myself, alone visiting the body. Finally, we have a reason to be alone together without losing everybody else. 

As a child, I was punished whenever I was sick. As a child, I was extremely ill for a long time and so I was punished severely for as long as you might imagine. I thought existence was punishment. (Until I realized that existence was actually everything else, and that it was other people who were punishment.) I'm telling you this so I can tell you what I learned about bodies and what they mean for people who don't have any money. When you don't have any money you need your body and if your body fails you then you have failed everybody who needs your body because they don't have money. I need to tell you now that I had money as a child. When I say everybody, I mean my mother, who did not have money for a very long time and even when she did have money, the memory of no-money haunted her like a ghost, or like a husband who left after I was born. (Remember that. Everybody always means my mother. Imagine everybody is a new word you are learning and the meaning of it is mother.) Imagine being born into the world sick, and everybody watches you for years, sleeping in a hospital cot next to your bed. Everybody tells you, without words, in more ways than one: if you don't get better, I'll kill you. (This kind of thing I understand now. I too have hovered over the beds of people I've loved, with a rage filled love, honing a possession with teeth).  (I'll never forgive you if you leave me here alone.) I tell everybody I've forgotten those years, even when my body freezes up in hospital rooms. I go bravely into my appointments, now, always with a book (a friend) in hand. When everybody tells the story among family friends, everybody says: you don't know how hard those years were for me. 

I'm letting you know everybody and myself survived this kind of haunting, and we are alright now and more free than I could have imagined possible. We are still haunted but it is not the bad kind of ghost anymore. This house isn't haunted by anybody we don't know. I'm telling you this now so you don't have to worry about me, as I know you do. You don't have to feel for me, even if you do. 

Anyways, yesterday night I was alone with myself, ill in New York City. Did you know this was the city where I was sick for all those early years? When I left Los Angeles to return to New York, everybody threatened that I would get sick so far away from home. Everybody was right. Everybody is always right.

Last night I had a fever dream in which I had a skin condition where patterns of flowers and landscapes had been stitched all over my body. The doctors didn't believe me (they never do) so I pulled up the cuff of my pants to show them the crocheted flowers all over my legs. It was itchy, I pled with them, please help me. They sent me home and I took off my pants and began to ferociously unstitch the patterns out of my skin. Part of me wanted to preserve the images somehow, so I could paint them later. In the dream I thought to myself: I want to keep this, but in a way I can understand. I want to be beautiful, but not like this. I felt the threads moving under my skin as I pulled out each thread. But I couldn't unravel myself fast enough and they would continue to appear over and over across my skin, those beautiful images that I could not forget even now when the dream is over. Waking up, I missed those flowers and I traced my fingers over the parts of my body where the patterns had been stitched in my dream. 

Before writing to you this morning I lay in bed a long time. For a moment I thought I saw the bed stand shake and thought with a rush of anxiety: earthquake. Then I remembered I was in New York now, and the shake was probably the neighbors upstairs. Having lived in Los Angeles for so long, I cannot un remember the fear of drought, fire, and quake. People who live in LA live knowing the end of the world is right around the corner, or maybe already here. In New York I don't even know what to be afraid of yet. I coughed and rolled over and tried to go back to sleep, maybe to dream of flowers again. There was a small comfort in knowing I did not have to fear the ground shaking under my feet, of everything around me tumbling down because I knew what was coming but I hadn't cared enough to be ready for it.