When The World is Ash, Does Your Puff of Smoke Matter?
Do your small problems still matter? YES.
One hundred and thirteen isn’t as hot as I thought it would be. It’s the kind of heat that bears down on you, slows your steady walk to a climb to a crawl but it’s not the temperature that does you in — it’s the sun. Unlike back east, the heat here is dry but there’s nowhere to hide. No skyscrapers or long stretches of shade to shield you from the glare — there’s only the constant burn or the threat of it. If you asked me — a born and raised New Yorker — what California is like, I’d say there’s no escaping the sun.
I’m working on a project tied to Alzheimer’s, a disease I fear above all else, and last night I dreamt that I’d misplaced my eyes. Shouldn’t they be next to the warm glass of water and the lip balm on the dresser next to my bed, I thought? I tried to reason my way back to sight, but my dream was having it none of it. I moved from to room with gaping holes in sockets where my eyes should’ve been, wondering what kind of person forgets where they put their eyes?
I turn on all the lights and I’m standing in front of the hallway mirror. I pat the sides of my face, my head, my hair as if I’m feeling for keys in my pockets and then I realize my eyes have been there the whole time. But they don’t feel there — they feel foreign as if they’ve Frankenstein’d onto me. Screwed shut into my sockets without my knowing. I bolt upright in bed and then I realize it’s not my bed, it’s a bed I’ve rented for a period of time. And like the eyes in my head, where I sleep feels foreign to me too.
My dreams, much like reality, always start one way and end in another.
Last November, before the world as we knew it fell to blight, I wanted an adventure. I wanted to roam my adopted home and its inexplicably magical terrain. I wanted the high desert to stain me terracotta; I wanted sand in my teeth. I wanted to feel the biting cold of the mountain air, dogs off their leashes, hiking the sides of mountains where no cell towers could squeak through. I wanted to sleep under the sky, shattered glass painted over a charcoal black, and hold the shards in my hands.
I wanted to write my way to a new story not revisit the countless ones I’ve already told. I went from scaling boulders and rocks and tucking my loose pants into my boots to avoid snakes winding their way downhill to shuttering myself in a house that doesn’t belong to me. And even though we’re allowed to go out and stores and restaurants have begun to fold us in, it’s as if my country were a language I used to speak but slowly, over time, have lost the words. I stand in the middle of the street, masked up, not sure where to go.
I slouch back home exhausted from the landscape, the options, and the demanding, omniscient sun. This is not what I wanted. Of course, I feel like a failure. Another disappointment hurled into the growing pyre that is the last fifteen years of my life. The jobs not taken, the books not written, the loves not had, the friendships not abandoned and forever lost.
Yes, stranger, tell me to get over it when I feel as if I’m falling deeper into quicksand. Yes, stranger, give me the neat bow to tie over my complicated life.
I can never be fully broken because the world is forever shouting at me to get fixed.
If I’m being honest, really honest, I would like to go away. I would like a reprieve from all this sadness, having to write on proverbial tiptoe because I can’t write too many sad things in a row lest I lose more friends, more jobs, because contrary to your Pollyanna beliefs, history has a darling way of repeating itself. Most of us want to be different, believe we can, but we often retreat to the familiar, that which is uncomfortably comfortable. Known.
Look at your love and how it comes with conditions on the level of corporate contract negotiations — you rattle off requirements for all the ways we have to be. So, this is my manual for operation, for being. I lie, I edit, I tone down, I smile wide, I say today is a new day! I quote Rebecca Solnit. All to placate you. All to assure you I’m on an even keel.
I space out my sadness because I need you to hire me, I need you not to gossip about me, I need you not to treat me like bone china because all of this snuffs the human out of me. It’s easy to ghost and be cruel to someone whose words cover a page. You don’t see them. You don’t hear them. You don’t feel their body wrecked and ravaged.
I do all of this for you, at the expense of me, so I can continue the fiction that is this wonderful life. So we can all surround ourselves with our mountain of white lies because the reality is entirely too much to bear. We say we want the real, but not really. We want the real that’s been edited down, mopped up. We want the real in the context of your triumphant comeback tour because everyone loves a good comeback tour. We love collecting our t-shirts.
If I’m being honest, really honest, I would like to get on a plane. I would like to unknow me. I would like to live in Bucarest, Helsinki, or in a small mountain town because I have too many sweaters for someone living in Southern California. I would like to get my driver’s license again so I can actually drive. Wind down roads, hoping I don’t kill anyone. I would like to stop the analytical work, the virtual work, the work you can’t feel with your hands — just for a little while.
I would like my body to ache. I would like to feel something real and visceral instead of nothing, instead of people I can see over a screen, but can’t touch. And it occurs to me that as I get older there’s so much distance between what I want and what I can have. And that distance is a constant hurt because your wants fade further out of the frame and your life, as you know it, as it exists real and pragmatically, never escapes your field of vision.
I would like to cease being Felicia C. Sullivan for one month or three or a year or two — just for a little while I would like to try on something new for size.
I think these things while working on a coaching worksheet for a client. I think these things after two days of forgetting to take my meds this week and I’ve yet to recover. I think these things when I’m fighting with my lawyer because California bankruptcy courts don’t really understand the world is on fire and can you still pay your $1,762 a month, please? We offer no rest for the weary, silly rabbit. Trix are for kids!
I would like to rest. I would like to not spend every few months in abject terror over what’s to come.
I think these things when I examine every country’s animal quarantine laws to see where I can actually bring my cat, and nearly murder someone with a butter knife when they suggest I leave him behind. But I don’t because of murder and because of prison and because of every cat needing their mom, etc., etc., etc.
I think of these things when book agents say my work is wonderful and beautiful and necessary and good, and oh, by the way, we loved your first book (fluttering false lashes behind expensive eyewear) but the second one (twists face, here comes the ax), the Bookscan numbers (contorts face to the level of clown and circus), we don’t know (ellipsis, sad emoji). I think these things when people tell me they’d wish more people read my work, as if what I have or I’ve built is never, ever enough. Not realizing it took me years to feel comfortable with five people reading my work.
Sometimes, I wish people wouldn’t say anything at all. Sometimes, you make things that much worse. I bet that bon mot, that little piece of wisdom you imparted felt good though, right? Did your good deed for the day.
I think of these things when decent people are being slaughtered in my country and I need to stay and fight.
For a few days this week, I felt as if I traveled back to 2016, back to a dark country to which I never thought I’d return. I have to tell myself, however, this time it’s different. I have tools in my toolbox, a shrink on speed dial. I have to say these words loud and out loud otherwise my brain will refuse to hear them.
I look outside and see the world burning, falling to cinder and ash and there’s my little house, exhaling a puff of smoke. And I’m caught somewhere between it mattering and not mattering. Of touching my face and feeling still that these eyes, this life, isn’t my own.
Please do not leave responses on this post — I won’t be reading them to protect how I’m feeling at the moment. You’re leaving them for you, not me.
