It had been two days since I'd had anything to eat, two days since I saw the sunlight and two days since I ran out of cigarettes. Two days since I'd left this room. My body was receding into itself - my stomach gnawing at my insides, my eyes twitching with repressed anxiety. I could feel the stagnant air of my one-room apartment pressing down on my damp back. The ceiling fan spun lazily above me, creaking. The afternoon sun poked through the shutters on my window and cast shadows across my typewriter. The empty page that sat in the machine taunted me with it's whiteness, it's cleanness. My body was smudged with ink and dirt, my hair matted to my head, my fingers brown with grease.
I ripped the paper out of the typewriter and meticulously tore it into tiny pieces. I tossed the shreds into the air. The slight breeze from the fan caught them and they seemed almost to linger there, frozen in time, like this town, like me. As they drifted to the ground around me, I heard the sleet begin to pick up again. The cold light of the winter sun disappeared under a devilish thundercloud and rain and sleet began to barrage my window. I decided it was time to go out.
I didn't bother with a coat, or even a hat. Just the dirty white button up shirt and jeans that I'd been wearing for the past two days. I left my apartment and pressed the button for the elevator. As I lingered there, I let my mind wander.
The sleet reminded me of the hospital, of waking up in the infirmary to what sounded like rocks smashing against the window. I had been awake only moments before a nurse rushed over to me and began checking me, probing me. I remember the noise of the rain was so loud, I thought I was still in my living room with the screaming TV. I remember not being able to piece it together - my mind was a blank. I couldn't remember what happened on New Years or how I ended up in the hospital. Just the noise. I began to cry. The nurse tried to quiet me but she couldn't. I sobbed relentlessly, and I didn't know why. My head pulsed with a familiar pain. I could feel the tension building.
It grew, louder, harder, more painful, with every sob and sniff.
Ding.
The elevator. Back to reality. I stepped on, dazed.
There was that kid. Chambers? I couldn't remember. I acknowledged him with a grunt as he beamed up at me. He asked what floor. The bottom one. He hit 3.
I got off at three and took the stairs.
As I stepped outside for the first time in two days I could feel a tension seep out of my body. My lungs filled with fresh, new air and the rain began to wash away the dirt and ink. It was freezing. I didn't care. I walked across Katz toward the Butcher's. I needed some meat.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Monday, January 18, 2010
Reflection, or Hippocampus
I think my first "episode" happened when I was about nine years old. It was New Years Eve, 1999. The world was in a frenzied uproar with the excitement of the new millennium. Predictions of an apocalyptic corporate meltdown were running rampant through the emerging world wide web, and the already apathetic teenage population had collapsed in an orgy of revelry and self-deprivation. I had only a faint understanding of the events that were whirling around me, and I held them in little regard.
However, as the clock drew closer to midnight, to the future, a painful anxiousness began to rise in my stomach. I sat on the couch, eyes glued to the TV screen, my face clenched with repressed emotion. What was going to happen when that huge, glowing ball dropped down into Times Square? Would I be different? Would the world change? What about the people I knew? How would they change? Would I be able to recognize them? The tension mounted as the minutes passed.
It was almost midnight. I remember thinking that it was dumb for me to be so worried, but the fact that I was only agitated me further. I couldn't understand where this anxiety was coming from or what it was about.
I remember the countdown. I remember my dad enthusiastically trying to wake my mother, who had fallen asleep on the couch.
And as the noise on the television grew, I imagined myself swelling like a puffer fish and popping. the tension was too much, I felt something click in my head and all of a sudden the living room door burst off it's hinges and fell flat with a thud. My parents screams were drowned out by the sudden climactic roar of the crowd as the ball dropped and an enormous hippocampus careened in through the shattered doorway. The noise was deafening, but I could still hear it neigh and grunt as it flung itself about the room, slapping it's fish tail against the pictures hanging on the wall and crushing the coffee table with it's hooves. Because it's rear was that of a fish, the horse creature only had two front legs to stand on. It was clumsy and awkward, and it flapped about the room in a terrified frenzy, unable to control it's twisted body. My parents compressed into the couch in fear and the TV thundered with the debauchery of the celebration in Times Square.
I remained immobile, baffled, petrified, until the animal's enormous, slimy fish tail whirled around and slapped me into blissful unconsciousness.
However, as the clock drew closer to midnight, to the future, a painful anxiousness began to rise in my stomach. I sat on the couch, eyes glued to the TV screen, my face clenched with repressed emotion. What was going to happen when that huge, glowing ball dropped down into Times Square? Would I be different? Would the world change? What about the people I knew? How would they change? Would I be able to recognize them? The tension mounted as the minutes passed.
It was almost midnight. I remember thinking that it was dumb for me to be so worried, but the fact that I was only agitated me further. I couldn't understand where this anxiety was coming from or what it was about.
I remember the countdown. I remember my dad enthusiastically trying to wake my mother, who had fallen asleep on the couch.
And as the noise on the television grew, I imagined myself swelling like a puffer fish and popping. the tension was too much, I felt something click in my head and all of a sudden the living room door burst off it's hinges and fell flat with a thud. My parents screams were drowned out by the sudden climactic roar of the crowd as the ball dropped and an enormous hippocampus careened in through the shattered doorway. The noise was deafening, but I could still hear it neigh and grunt as it flung itself about the room, slapping it's fish tail against the pictures hanging on the wall and crushing the coffee table with it's hooves. Because it's rear was that of a fish, the horse creature only had two front legs to stand on. It was clumsy and awkward, and it flapped about the room in a terrified frenzy, unable to control it's twisted body. My parents compressed into the couch in fear and the TV thundered with the debauchery of the celebration in Times Square.
I remained immobile, baffled, petrified, until the animal's enormous, slimy fish tail whirled around and slapped me into blissful unconsciousness.
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