Monthly Archives: March 2011

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A Primer for Small Weird Loves

So, you kiss him, and he doesn’t move, he doesn’t
pull away, and you keep on kissing him. And he hasn’t moved
he’s frozen, and you’ve kissed him, and he’ll never
forgive you, and maybe now he’ll leave you alone.

Richard Siken

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I did not start this conversation I don’t intend to keep talking about it

In my dream I rolled over to find him luxuriating in my bed. The cat was on his belly, purring sanctimoniously, his tail flipping over the exquisitely detailed tattoo across C’s chest. I smiled at him. Then was seized by an animal panic and sprung from the bed. “You have to get out of here. You don’t live here anymore.” What are you talking about? he laughed gently, dismissively, at my hysteria. I’ve always lived here. “No. No no no. This is where I live and you have to leave. Please. Leave now.” Then I locked myself in my closet and hid behind the hanging dresses and coats at the very back. I woke up in an animal panic, clawing and shrieking. Hurry up hurry up. Get out get out.

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Watch me do my best

Stuffed with cotton batting, empty of resolve. The whole world is a glassy pharmaceutical haze and I can finally finally finally sleep. Watch me do my best Judy Garland. Watch me do my best Vivien Leigh. Watch me sashay through the end of the season unself-conscious like the most beautiful and emboldened of all the hot mess old-hollywood starlets.

Begin.

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Volatile Body

The I Ching reading for the day is #39 Obstacles, with no changing lines. The image is of a traveler poised between a great chasm of water and a massive un-passable mountain. The message is to pause and gather strength. Expect no movement, no change, no assistance, no display of dynamic force to be met with any kind of response. To that end, I lay around in my pajamas and drink coffee and read this insufferably boring book for tomorrow’s fem theory class. There is no way I will finish the assigned reading; the goal is simply to read enough of it to be able to write a coherent response paper, and be reasonably articulate during class.

I call my mother because it’s Sunday and I am staring listlessly at the television, which is what I’ve been doing for two months, more or less. 60 Minutes has just come on and it reminds me that we used to watch this and Cops back to back each Sunday night, a brief reprieve from her work schedule and our once-a-week guaranteed bonding time. She listens, this phone call, more than usual. Says,Oh jesus, your abandonment issues again, good god, this could not be a more perfect trigger. Says, I can’t believe you haven’t developed trust issues. Which elicits all kinds of self-deprecating huffs and snorts on my end. Says, Maybe it’s because you know how to ask for help when you need it. Maybe you can stay OPEN to people because you know how to ask for the help you need when you’re hurting.

I go to see my psychiatrist because I know how to ask for the help I need when I am hurting and the fact of the matter is this is a long bitch of a hike out of despondency and I don’t know how I got here and I can barely see the way out and I just need to know that I will, eventually, get out. She nixes the trazodone that’s got me shuffling around like a zombie, adds klonopin and wellbutrin to my daily prozac dose. Psychotropic snacktime. Last night I took my first dose of klonopin and I am still floating back and forth across my own apartment today. I think about the complex article I read last night about the way the liver metabolizes substances–put simply, one substance at a time; I think that at some point my liver will finish metabolizing the klonopin and the wellbutrin and the 8 cups of coffee I downed this morning in an effort to concentrate hard enough to finish reading 250 pages about the phenomenology of perception will hit all at once, and maybe that is what is happening now, I do feel fidgety and flushed but I still feel quite stoned.

Jez says klonopin is a good med for heartbreak and I am perplexed by this and she explains it allows your neurons to knit themselves back together a little, it gives your body a break and that seems advisable, because I am very tired after two months of not-sleeping and not-eating and not-menstruating–the truth is that I am not trying to make this difficult for myself and this is not convenient or comfortable and I don’t want to be here anymore and I don’t know why it is so hard. I don’t. I just don’t.

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Phenomenology of Perception

To begin with, we spoke summarily of a reversibility of the seeing and the visible, the touching and the touched. It is time to emphasize that it is a reversibility always immanent and never realized in fact. My left hand is always on the verge of touching my right hand touching things, but I never reach coincidence; likewise I do not hear myself as I hear others, the sonorous existence of my voice is for me as it were poorly exhibited; I have rather an echo of its articulated existence, it vibrates through my head rather than outside. I am always on the same side of my body, it presents itself to me in one invariable perspective.

Merleau-Ponty

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Dreamed that I was riding around in a truck with the Professor, who kept discarding his newborn offspring. Exasperated, I finally disembarked and claimed the last baby as my own. It was red and fussy and beautiful. I swaddled and cared for it. It was my baby.