The Good and the Bad; or, One Terrible Winter
Many a thing has happened since my last hilarious, poignant, decaf tea and yoga mat post. There has been so much good, like, for instance getting a job at a gallery, which allows me to say things like, “What do I do? I work at a gallery.” There’s also been a lot of bad, for instance, losing my keys at two in the morning on a below freezing night and discovering that the diamond bracelet I found in the cereal isle at Harris Teeter is not just cubic zirconium, it is blood cubic zirconium—optically flawless but chemically produced by legions of poor Africans in horrid conditions. I’ve been trying to decide if the medium plus has outweighed the medium minus in the past few weeks. Right now and right here, scribbling on the back of a buy-one-romance-get-one-free coupon behind a register at my second job as a big box bookseller, events seem more terrible than wonderful. My heavy boots, however, could just be my right here and right now situation; that is, halfway through the early shift I take each Sabbath not out of the joy of touching other peoples’ money while accruing so little of my own, but because Sunday is the most dangerous day of the week. A bloody Mary breakfast leads to two p.m. PBRs leads to nine p.m. secret-sharing from a bar stool confessional. These Sabbath shifts are my stay-out-of-trouble plan, but forgoing eggs Florentine with my favorite friends harshes my mellow in a serious way, and so, right now and right here, I feel a serious Fuck You towards the world and want the past weeks and, perhaps, this whole miserable season, to be so far in past as to be forgotten.
The bad bad reached a mountain top on a Saturday two weeks ago. I stopped by our neighborhood coffee shop/chicken coop/bingo hall with my pal S. Windsor (of the Pensecola Windsors). A neighbor friend was there—a sweetheart of a guy who is not only a seriously good artist and a seriously important part of our community but also my style icon and the reason I wear my beanie above my ears like I’m about to swab a deck somewhere atop the Atlantic. Said neighbor told that us that he’d had a massive asthma attack a few days before, couldn’t find his puffer, passed out when all the oxygen had escaped his lungs, and, as he was dying, the capillaries in his eyes burst. At the coffee shop, my friend took off the sunglasses he will be wearing for the next few weeks or even months, and it looked like this good sweet man had been hanging out in the fourth circle of hell. There was no white in his eyes. None. They were a deep red, deeper than blood or stop signs. This story of near death and the shock of his eyes moved the fog in and all of a sudden I was on the ground, passed out, my own eyeballs rolled up in their sockets, out (Note: I wish I had seen this because swooning is probably the most lady-like thing I’ve ever done). When I came to, I was being held up by friends. It felt like I was really, really drunk. Like more drunk than I’ve ever been, more even than Ibiza New Years 2006 when I woke up in a sandy trench covered in body paint. But more than just shaky and Casper white, I was upset the way one gets when learning that someone we care about saw the end.
Two years ago, during my annual pap smearing, my doctor found a lump in my breast. She said it was probably nothing, just too much coffee or a pebble that worked it’s way into my nipple. She told me to keep a hand on my mammaries, do the monthly shower exam, and come back in if anything changed. I tried to self-examine a few times, but who can tell the difference between a lump of cancer and a lump of coal? Besides, I was young and healthy and I ride my bike and drink green tea and eat kale at least once a week. The only bad things that had ever happened to me were of my own creation, like when I’ve opted for dance parties instead of work, which is still kind of worth it. I was twenty-four and I was more than special. I was invincible. But in that moment, when Dr. Chai went from my left breast to my right breast and then back to the left, probing one spot over and over, I wasn’t special or invincible. I was human and I was scared.
After I woke up from temporary blackness two weeks ago, my first impulse was to call the person who, until recently, had been my person. And I likely would have called her but I deleted her number and, besides that, the surrounding friends have more sense than I and would have thrown my phone in the nearby Port-a-Johns before allowing me to make that call. But I passed out and my friend almost died and hers was the voice I wanted to hear and she wasn’t there and it was all so very wrong. S. Windsor (of the Pensecola Windsors) took me to the hospital after coming to out of a fear of seizures and also because I wanted to take advantage of my health insurance. I didn’t have a seizure, just a blood-rushing reaction to trauma, but the doctor told me to take it easy for a little while. I said that I couldn’t because there was a hot babe coming to town that night and I wanted to party. He understood but advised me to get an EKG while I was there. When the he came back after the test, he showed me a graph of the results. There was an irregularity, he said, most likely nothing serious, but something to watch all the same. There’s no shower check for your heartbeat, so he told me to get it checked by my doctor as soon as I could. Again, most likely nothing to worry about. But in that moment, when I expected to be fine, for him to send me home with a lolipop and immaculate bill of health, expected to be twenty-six and not just special but invincible, I was scared again and human again.
When I got home, freaked out by the whole experience, I emailed the person who used to be my person. Something happened, I said. Please call me. My heart beat was broken and my friend almost died and imagining what he must have felt when he looked in the mirror after suffocating alone on his floor and saw the red in his eyes made me so sad and so worried because I am not invincible and neither is he and neither is she. She called me the next day and I told her what happened. I wanted her to say the right things, to tell me that she was worried, that it would all be okay, and, mostly, that she missed me. But she didn’t say those things. She seemed, if nothing else, annoyed to be pulled back into my life. This, not hearing those words, made me curl into a cave of blankets and sleep for hours because when you sleep you don’t exist and there are no words to hear and no words to not hear.
It is a crime to make someone else unhappy. All crimes start with making ourselves unhappy. Roger Ebert said this. He is facing the end of his life, unable to eat or drink or speak or even open his mouth because cancer took his jaw. And he is right. As unhappy as I was not to hear the words, I miss you, I can only be unhappy with myself. Unhappy that I wanted to hear her voice, unhappy that I tried to force someone who wanted two nights a week, who wanted no obligation, to hold hands and shop for groceries. We were best together when we were sleeping, my arm over her torso, still and silent for a few easy hours, not asking each other to want the things we didn’t want.
And that’s what this terrible winter has taught me: when it’s two in the morning and you’re locked out of your house, when your tree house blows down and the neighbor’s dog keeps barking, when the streetlight wakes you up at midnight and you can’t go back to sleep, when your rent check gets lost and you can’t afford another stamp, when you’re behind a register while your friends are all at brunch, when you catalog the month’s events and find there’s more bad than good, just find your puffer and take a breath. And then, when you no longer want to call, when you take off your sunglasses and see the whites of your eyes, when your heart beat isn’t broken and a lump is just a lump, stop making yourself unhappy and see the people holding you up.
