I must be feeling a tiny bit better. Yes, I still mostly sit on the couch, but I’m feeling the world around me again. I like sitting in my spot, a pillow and a book in my lap, or a cat, and being able to reach across to touch Mike’s elbow as he plays a video game. I read as his music drifts through my story. I look up to see his graphics, his avatar. Sometimes they mesh, like when I read Beowulf, one story, one battle after another with music and graphics included.
I just finished reading Chuck Wendig’s big book, Wanderers. It still has hold of my imagination. The pain of my dysautonomia has let go, a little, of my imagination. My body allows my mind to wander as long as I don’t do too much. The other night, I dreamed a fungus grew out of my hands. This morning, I wondered how to solve the problem of the people in the world. Wendig did that with his words. He held me in thrall through 780 pages. He holds me still.
When I finish reading a powerful book, sometimes I’m empty for a few days, desolate, as if all the stories are finished and there are no more. Then, I start a new book, imagining that it could never take hold in the dirt of my imagination the way the last one did.
This new book I’m reading is Punching the Air by Ibi Zoboi and Yusef Salaam. Poetry. This, too, is a powerful book. I think of what a person is compared to what I assume he is. I struggle with that same problem, people not seeing who I am, but at least they don’t want to put me into prison over it.
Last night, I reached over to touch Mike’s elbow. We’d been talking about my mother’s vaccine, how much it would protect her, how she assumed I would visit as soon as my vaccines were complete.
“You can’t travel. You have trouble going to the grocery store,” he said.
“I tried to tell her, but she can’t see me. She never could see me.”
He lifted his elbow where I held on, his little motion of solidarity. Mike can see me. Nick is beginning to see me now that he’s an adult. I have a few friends who can see me, who accept what I’ve told them about my new diminished self. My mother, though, doesn’t.
“It won’t end when she dies. I’ll still struggle with that after she dies, won’t I?”
“You assume she’ll die before you do.”
He said it out loud. He sees me. He doesn’t hide from me. And he knows how she would shift my memory into the good and talented daughter from the one who constantly disappoints her now. I know her memory of me will never match the awed, the furious, the curious, the too talkative, or the selfish person that I really am. I don’t want to die yet, but I’ve been blessed to live an interesting and warm life alongside this man who tells the truth of me.
I only ever needed one or two people who could see the real me behind the mask that people want to put on my face. I picked up my new book. I wanted to see if I could recognize this boy in the book through his words alone. I hoped I could.
Thank you for listening, jules