Paolo: You know we’re getting married soon?
me: Yep, only two weeks left [before we sign the papers in Chicago]. You know, you’re the pain in my ass.
Paolo: I’m the pain in your ass!?
me: Like a machine, always needing to move, move, run, climb, go.
Paolo: The stone that rolls doesn’t grow mold. I’m keeping your ass from growing mold.
me: HA!
Paolo: Well, you did grow a tick…
Yeah, so remember that tick-bite I got on SATURDAY? Well, by Wednesday it looked like this (don’t worry, I kinda exaggerated about how close it was to the goodies (kinda):
And then the doc told me I have Lyme disease. Yeah… you can rejoice now - YAY!!! The joys of this year are seemingly endless.
I’ve spent plenty of time in North Africa, India, Mexico and loads of other places where you think twice about brushing your teeth with the water. [Paolo just asked me to insert Italy into that list... not sure what that means... please come to our wedding]. Anywho, I’ve had plenty of grody diseases that have made me crap and puke and expunge… things that humans shouldn’t have to imagine expunging, and usually in embarrassing or less than comfortable places at that. But this takes the fucking cake. I GET A GRODY DISEASE IN FRANCE?? LESS THAN 30 km FROM PARIS??? FUCK!!!
Besides this, Paolo has been in bed sick with the flu the last couple of days. And the hansosan came back with more than bursitis… something about his colon and intestines exploding… I dunno, I forget what it’s called. But, you know, nothing as bad as LYME DISEASE. FROM A FUCKING BLOOD-SUCKING INSECT!! DID I MENTION IT WAS A FRENCH INSECT????
Seriously people, if you get bitten by a tick and anything feels funny… or looks like this, or like a bullseye? You’d better get it checked out. Because if you don’t catch it right away, lyme disease can stay pretty quiet in your system for years and years… like until it creeps into your heart and spinal cord and maybe even your brain. Fifty bucks at the doc is better than a lifetime of TICKBITE IN YOUR FUCKING BRAIN.
PS- (DID I MENTION I HATE TICKS???)
Hansosan, his daughter and I head down to Fontainebleau to catch up with P. The hansosan has decided to come along despite an extremely painful bursitis of the elbow. About a half hour past Paris I ask him to pull over so I can vomit copiously at a gas station. I’d forgotten my meds. Ten minutes back on the road, and his daughter faints in the car. This is not something unexpected, as she has spent the last year battling unexplained fainting fits that look a lot like epilepsy but haven’t been properly diagnosed. We finally roll into the campground around midnight, and the gates are locked. I call P and he helps us chuck all our packs and bags to the tents.
It is now day two without my meds. This was a bad idea. A very bad idea. It rains most of the day. P, of course, manages to climb anyhow. I spend the better part of the afternoon making moss-fairy boats.
The fairy’s name is Esmerelda, by the way, and if you can’t see her then you don’t believe.
I curl up with the dogs and pass out. I should have brought my meds.
When we get back to the campsite I notice a few ticks on Charlie. I pull them out. Then I notice a few ticks on Scapi. I pull them out. Then I realise that the lovely afternoon nap was had in a tickbed. I rush to the tent and call P in to do what true love requires. Luckily, no ticks in my ass. Unfortunately, one has embedded itself close enough to my hoo-ha to make me scream and yank it out before P can reach the tweezers. I burn the sonofabitch.
I’m twitching and jerking all over the place. My brain feels something like fireworks if they could make them into a yo-yo. I hold myself together reasonably well and we have a lovely birthday dinner for the hansosan. His daughter faints again on the way home. This time, it’s a long episode. We sit up with her for an hour or so, until she feels well enough to go to the tent. We all go to bed.
I wake up in the tent and smell shit. I mean- I smell SHIT. Like somebody rubbed my nose in it. Since I feel a bit like a crackhead in withdrawal, I sense that smelling shit could just be another side effect. So I wake Paolo. He is blind without his glasses but finally finds a pile of puke in the tent and cleans it up. To Charlie’s credit, he actually tried to wake Paolo up several times before depositing the little pile of grass and bile neatly next to our heads.
About an hour later, I wake up in the tent and smell shit. Paolo’s glasses come out again, but we don’t see anything. Back to sleep.
You can repeat that last paragraph two more times.
I wake up in the morning to find that Charlie has projectile-liquid-shit all over my sleeping bag. And my backpack. And my clothes. And my side of the tent. Everything on Paolo’s side of the tent is perfectly clean. But I have been sleeping in diarrhea. I run out of the tent and vomit copiously. This is not the way to start day three without meds. Lovely P cleans everything while I writhe and moan in the car.
So, to sum up the weekend: bursitis, vomiting, fainting, tick near hoo-ha, projectile diarrhea, and no meds. Oh… and we may have climbed a wee bit as well, but I’ll have to let you know once I’m properly medicated again.
A girl so few of friends in a strange land after four years, though she has tried incredibly hard to make them, sitting at home, alone. It is the night before a bank holiday. She will soon lose this job (like everybody!) that she hates, but then she doesn’t know what she will do. Her fiance has taken one of the two dogs and gone to another country to climb for a long weekend. She has nobody to talk to and nothing to do between his calls. So she has rented three movies of which she has already watched two, mostly. She wishes the dog would come to her from the couch, lay warm and loving against her legs. Mostly, she is pressing the reload icon on her computer over and over again, wishing there was somebody out there, listening, caring, maybe even wanting (just a little bit?) to tell her they are there.
Okay, I know this may be cheating a bit, but I have loads of writing tucked away and it’s always fun (in a self-humiliating, masochistic kind of way) to go back and rediscover the past. So I’m going to try and do these two (years) and one (month) specials every now and then.
Two years and a month ago I wrote:
Today is reflective, romantic, melancholy, and hopeful. Watched Henry and June, finally. Had been on my list for a long time. But was reading up on Anais Nin a couple of months ago - led there by a surrealist/erotica search for an abstract painting I loved but can’t remember the name of, nor the artist. Saw it today and picked it up. The Left Bank in that time period is an obsession for me. I missed my time, you see - I should have been there! I should have been young there! I should have made love there! Henry Miller, strangely enough, I have never read. Started Tropic of Cancer once, quite a while ago, but couldn’t get through it. Maybe I should try it again now that I’m older.–What did I do this afternoon? First, the dentist. Yuck. He didn’t wear gloves. Is that normal? Freaked me out. But decent guy, explained before he touched, which I like. Of course I marched in with my records from my last dentist, knowing what I wanted, ready to fight. But it was okay. Medicine is much more human here. I like it more. Then again, you’re walking into somebody’s house, which is always a little strange. Paolo had part 1 of a root canal long over-due (I saw that tooth a couple of years ago and said so). Yes, I know everything.Then what? Bank, to take care of some things. Unusually hot in the lobby with the sun shining through. Sweating and grimacing while transferring “large” amounts of money. Then inside to set up some automatic transfers. Charmed the guy behind the desk; had him laughing. Good-looking black guy, young, gave me some free stuff and a new password for my CD-banking thing. Funny conversation about why I’ve had it for two years and not used it… basically, week 2 after arriving here, I understood “vous… madame… banque…transferer… ” and they handed me the CD. “Oui, oui”. That was the end of that. Not to mention, I didn’t have a computer until this past September.–SO, after the bank, to the climbing shop. Was supposed to be a brief walk-through. Couldn’t resist, bought a new crashpad. My other one is so small it starts to look like a postage stamp from just a couple of feet off the ground. Good for extra padding, but not for motivation. Also got new pants - on sale, “the ugliest things I”ve ever seen” according to Paolo. But I like ugly.After that, haircut. Got the weird gay guy. But I’ll look for him again next year - put my head in the little tank and he washed my hair. I love my hair touched, and my head. He scratched my scalp a bit under the warm water; I closed my eyes, it felt so good. He did it for a couple of minutes. I almost fell asleep right there. He was very gentle the whole time, but never too gentle - knew also when to pull, and how to dry my hair so my scalp felt good. Heaven in 6 minutes. Then groceries, then home. Long afternoon. Hair smells nice - he sprayed some stuff in it, sweet, like smelling the wind come off an orchard of fruit… apples and lemons and peaches together?–I need to break the awful habit of using smiley-face emoticons, non-words like ”lol’ and “imho”. If I can’t express those emotions creatively in words, then I shouldn’t be trying to write at all. It’s bad for writing well, and writing expressively. At least to an audience who you know is intelligent and capable of subtlety.–I’m enjoying the Venice book immensely, but it’s incredibly distracting. I need to look up and explore every character I come across. So I’m only half way through. Finished the Missouri Review in one night. Still shitting myself over the quality of work, and the (lack of) quantity. Interview in there with David Sedaris, one of my heroes of pulp literature. Oxymoron in that phrase, I know, but you know what I mean if you’ve ever read Sedaris.
What is a nervous breakdown? It is not wanting to spend another second in your skin. It is hating yourself for feeling that way, for laying that burden upon those around you. It is knowing that the only way to make quiet is to remove your brain from the equation, and also knowing the only way to do that. It is your brain in salty water, calling to you like a siren - SILENCE ME, SILENCE ME! - trying to pull you under. Then you tie yourself to a pole so that you cannot do what everything in you screams to do, and try to weather the storm. And you don’t know why. It is dancing delicately on Occam’s razor, trying to find anything that makes sense and finding nothing at all.
There is no easy answer. There is no logic. There is only the disease, sucking at your soul, an alien in your brain. In my case, unipolar depression, which is (as I jokingly told a friend today) like having bipolar disorder, only without any of the fun of the upswings.
Now, four months into the scary medications, something is coming back together. My hands still quiver and shake while I search for the right words, but I can search for them! I can see the outline of where I once stood; I just need to figure out how to write the paragraphs, then the sentences, then the words. I was never good with punctuation, anyway.
Now I have a wedding to plan. Yes, P and I have decided. I don’t know why he loves me, but he does. This disease is horrid. It is inexplicable. I am hard to reach, even for myself. I don’t deserve his love. I feel like a wretch from the gutter, a liar and a thief who has been unknowingly ushered into the dance of the faeries. And I want do dance, I do! I want the soft relief of his steady arms, his steady mood, his steady love. I just hope I don’t bring occam’s razor with me.
