It’s Been Five Months

I’m having a hard time writing today and I’m not sure why. There’s a big fan blowing white noise toward me and I feel calm, but also a little bit queasy. Could be anything.

Two people have asked me, within the last few weeks, how I’ve felt since starting to eat not-strictly-vegan. It’s the same thing people asked me four years ago when I started to eat pretty-strictly-vegan: how does it make you feel? Do you have more or less vitamin-B-12 energy? Is your skin celery-stalk clear, hair egg-white glossy? Do your shoulders hold more, or less, grass-fed tension?

I used to toss around variegated explanations, but the bottom, top, and sideline answer is simple and it’s that I don’t know. Which is the same reason that I have begun to lose my shit over derailed details and last-minute plans. It’s why, lately, I wake up in the middle of the night and can’t fall back asleep, because a million different thoughts of things to do (like respond to months-old messages) or not do (like eat so much) attack. And then, in true survival-of-the-fittest fashion, those to-do’s evolve into harder-to-dismiss should-haves (like hugged her more) and should-not-haves (like told her to wash her feet).

I wish that eating yogurt again were the reason for the a loss of confidence I am so quick and easy to experience now; for the warped and continual sense that what I’m saying or doing or feeling is bad, is hurtful, is offensive. There are mornings, like this one, when I feel just fine. When I find out that I can’t keep my dog in Hope’s apartment as planned because her super is coming to install an AC unit and I can feel the constriction of anxiety in my chest and I can say out loud that “I’m trying not to freak out,” and, in doing so, keep myself calm and patient and okay.

And then things move too quickly and I lose it anyway. Because it seems like this should be easy to figure out, but my brain moves too slowly, processes too thoroughly, wants to explore all the intricacies of every possible next step before any decisions are made. Wants to find some semblance of certainty, while still knowing it exists only in trace quantities, with illusory qualities; wants to know what it’s up against.

I have not always been like this. I hope I will not always be like this. On May 12th, I was afraid that I’d never be able to think about anything else except my sister. I sat on Alexis’s Portland porch in the sun with Kathleen and asked if it was permanent, the thinking about Emily each and every time I had time think. Now, I think about police brutality and cat calls and my (former) students and myself-separate-from-my-sister. I think about which shoes I’ll pack when I leave the country. I think about how not amazing it is that I’m running so little and how amazing it is that I’m running at all and wonder which is true and when.

It was different, you know, when she was alive. Then I could ask questions, get half-answers, get half-resolutions. I could trust that she’s going to be okay. Now that I know the ending — well, I guess that’s just it: I know the ending. And I just have to keep telling myself it’s going to be okay.