It used to reside in open plan offices that smelled faintly of yesterday’s soup. It used to curl up on keyboards and yawn at powerpoint presentations that were doomed to be made-viewed-discarded-made-viewed-discarded. And, once a month, it used to slink onto my bank statement and preen.
The Point didn’t enjoy its unexpected uprooting. It disappeared for long months, presumably butting its head against the closed glass of sliding doors that no longer allowed entrance. It must have spent hours beneath familiar windows, now closed just too far to admit it. I’d hear grumbling yowls in the night, as it yearned for what was and bemoaned what is.
And then one day, it finally wended its way back to me, with ears chewed until scalloped and with pale moons of bare skin along its flank, an inverse leopard. We started out slow: careful sniffs at a paint palette and a cautious paw batting a runaway sponge. Staring matches with spider plants, pressing close to a warm oven door, curling into loving arms.
I’m waiting for a letter. It exists in potentia every morning I approach the letterbox, a Schrödinger’s envelope that only resolves itself as my key turns in the lock.
The letter will contain an appointment date, one that I can hang on my empty reels of calendar. It will let me pretend to myself that things will one day revert, the threads will once more be woven into a tightly held pattern of predictability.
In the meantime, the future unspools wildly and puddles at my feet, shapeless and purposeless.
Of course, my former self resented those tight wefts of work and travel. The endless predictability of the future chafed and bit, and left no thread free for a spontaneous embroidered trill.
Yet despite the benefits to my current state of uncertainty, I remain blind.
Society isn’t all that keen on people having unplanned futures, or unpredictable and potentially unstable paths. It likes individuals to snap into acceptable roles, populate and pay up. Faltering in no man’s land is a sign of weakness, laziness, fecklessness, or failure, so people self-flagellate until they implode or fit back in.
I circle myself in my mind and snap at my heels whenever I start enjoying myself. I can’t relax into this state in case I start liking it.
Instead, I remain vigilant and wait for a letter, listening for the click-clack of a loom re-started.
Last week I went along to a pain clinic appointment.
Middle-aged, male doctor, blunt opener:
‘I’m going to be honest with you. I don’t know why you’re here.’
Not the most auspicious start.
The barrage of honesty continued. I had the wrong type of pain (he only does localised pain – one joint, for preference), and I was still under investigation so shouldn’t have been sent to him.
He’d mis-read my notes and wasn’t all that happy when I pointed out the mix up (‘I don’t make things up. I don’t lie.’) I upped the amount of solicitousness in my tone and added a hefty sprinkle of ‘I’m so sorry’, and ‘of course’.
I queried whether he had any advice on painkillers, and he assumed I was trying to scalp him for opiates:
‘You shouldn’t be taking opiates. I don’t want to see another drug-addled patient walking through my door.’
Pause.
I made an attempt to explain that opiates were all I’ve got, given that we don’t have a way to treat the muscle behaviour because we don’t know what’s going on.
‘My best advice is don’t lose your job. And don’t take opiates.’
Pause.
‘You’re well educated? You google everything? Know things better than your consultants?’
He’d nailed that one – I’m an inveterate googler, but I’m also wise enough to go into medical appointments with an open mind. It was rapidly closing in this particular appointment.
‘You could join a Pain Management Programme. There’s one here, but we don’t have a psychologist and you need a good psychologist, that’s what you really need.’
It was around this point that I crumpled into tears, thereby annoyingly underlining his point.
The nurse was sent for some hand towels (I foolishly seem to see consultants without tissues to hand), and the tone rapidly shifted from ‘honesty’ to ‘I really wish I could do something for you.’
He described me as ‘delightful’ and ‘distressed’ in his letter to my GP. I feel like I stepped into another century.
Painkillers are saviours. With them, there’s a chance that things won’t escalate and I’ll get back to normal much sooner. With them, I’m less likely to do something stupid to make the pain go away. They’re an occasional safety net, a buffer that stops my brain from blowing its tolerance gauge.
But they also coat my brain in lethargy and sew my eyelids shut. They drain me of saliva and dangle me by the nape of my neck so my limbs hang heavy and helpless. My words come slow and cracked, and bruises bloom on my shins and shoulders.
There are heaving queues of sweaty people outside ticket booths, long snakes made of shouting and shoving.
She moves along them. Short, thin to the point of brittle, with old apple skin and grey hair pulled tightly back.
Her voice cuts through the shouts, an endless lament of need that sends eyes to the floor or the ceiling with unerring aim.
She has him on her back. He must have at least two feet on her, his limp legs drag the floor behind her, while his head lolls above her shoulder with a vacancy that suggested he is spared the wail of her voice. He is thin too, but his body is soft, cheeks hanging down and jolting with each of her steps. His arms hang loose across her front, strapped to bony shoulders with frayed blue cord.
She moves steadily, for all his apparent weight, up and down each queue. Her calls part the crowd effortlessly but she draws no coin from any hand.
And when she moves on, the shouting picks up again in her wake, snapping back to fill the void.
She never really left that train station in my memory. She just keeps walking through those queues over and over again, steps never faltering.
It might be a better fate than the one that reality actually holds for an aging mother dragging her adult son on her back in a country without a welfare state.
I can never find the edge where we stop and illness begins.
The line that divides personality from disease is fractal, endlessly complex and barely perceptible. And the closer you are to someone, the more you realise that their illness invades every action, every reaction.
I wonder sometimes who you would be if it were cut from you, leaving only the pieces that are actually you behind. Would your soul buoy upward with every sinew sliced apart? Would a rose tint engulf your vision after a lifetime of grey? Would all those barriers and obstacles and weights and troubles clatter to the ground with a tremendous roar as you finally shook free?
I suspect the shadow shape left behind by the carving would continue to whisper. It goes too deep now. Its flesh is your flesh.
And so I learn to love what has become you. I watch my own flesh begin to entwine with illness and cannot stop decisions from being nudged by this poisonous pairing. A scorpion’s sting lodged in its own back.
We have become one and the same. Fraying at the edges.
The division was pleasingly symmetric, although it got a bit wonky along the spine (it’s not all that easy to do with a kitchen knife).
My left side had finally had enough of being the silent partner, the good one, the better half, always held back by its troublesome twin. All those shows it had to miss, the dinners it didn’t get to eat, and the sleep it could never recover.
My right side is the problem child. It throws tantrums until the whole body has to vomit, and it ruins everything. It gets all the attention: ‘Are you sitting comfortably? Do you need anything else? Shall I get you some ice?’
My left side just watched all the while.
I’m not sure what pushed it over the edge. Maybe the conversation I had with the doctor about having to wait even longer for another referral. Maybe the paddy my right side pulled that meant I missed Hamilton (left side really likes musicals).
It’s free now in any case. A bit wobbly on its newborn single sole, and with half a tongue poking through half a jaw of teeth whenever its hand tries to do anything fiddly. But it’ll get there.
No longer hidden backstage, my left side finally has the spotlight.
*This is basically one long piece about vomiting, probably not a great accompaniment for food… (Unless that floats your boat).
Ah Cathay Pacific. Forever wedded to vomit in my mind. It was a very unhappy union.
I was on a long haul flight from China to London and had been cramping merrily for hours. Ibuprofen wasn’t making a dent, despite inadvisable dosages.
My main mistake was choosing to eat airplane food in a belated attempt to line my stomach.
My gorge rose with no warning. Gargantuan and whale like, it buckled my face in a wild bid for freedom. I attempted to keep all orifices closed but was scuppered by my nose, which released a high speed spray of tiny pasta bows – all over the business man next to me.
His suit was wrapped in a lap blanket (he’d clearly done something right in a former life), but he didn’t seem particularly comforted. He reached to prod me, caught sight of my bulging cheeks, and wisely opted to call the air hostess instead.
At this point, the flood gates opened.
A stream of hostesses approached me in masks and gloves with dozens of tiny Cathay Pacific wet wipes, the scent of which promptly launched another volley of vomit.
I assume they thought I was carrying some virulent disease that could land them all in quarantine, so I appreciate that they were willing to come close enough to drop the wet wipes off.
Interminable hours later, I arrived in London on wobbly legs and in a nose-hair dissolving cloud of scent (though I had been wearing a mustard and brown striped jumper, which turns out to be the best vomit camouflage gear you could ask for). I was left very much alone on the coach back to Oxford, free to concentrate on willing my stomach contents to stay put.
My parents picked me up (they were even willing to make physical contact, which is a sign of true love), and watched me with worried faces as I wove toward the car.
I arrived at the boot, and promptly booted over the back wheel – much to the shock of various tourists who clearly hadn’t spent much time in a university town before.
My parents, ever the heroes, actually let me inside the car rather than strapping me to the top, and got me back to safety and a shower at record speed.
I still find Cathay Pacific wet wipes lurking amongst my things. A small plasticky reminder of this proud occasion.
I crawled into my first shell in childhood, a tiny whorl of cream that settled a comforting weight around my shoulders.
Likes reading, more slapdash than her brother, bit of a temper, proud, lies really well, perfectionist.
I outgrew that first shell in my teenage years and found myself a larger one, a cone splattered with brown.
Thoughtful, doesn’t like getting things wrong, good at big picture stuff, hates trying new things unless she knows she’ll be good at them. Good with other people but doesn’t always have the confidence to speak up.
When I headed to university, I moved into a long pale spiral that gleamed inside.
Works well with others but needs her own space, will step up to lead if given a shove. Picks things up quickly, sees too many sides to successfully argue just one angle.
And so I moved as I changed, finding new homes whenever I outgrew the last.
I’ve been in my current shell for the last few years. It’s a gorgeous mottled green, fading to yellow at the tip. It fitted well, holding all that I am, all that I enjoy, and all that I was capable of.
But now it hangs loose about me.
The person who chose this home saw the world differently, had different expectations, and had assumptions that can no longer come to pass.
It is time to choose another shell.
There is a sadness in leaving one behind: I’m losing the familiar and the loyal, and moving into the unknown. But with change comes potential and possibility.
This new shell will contain my new self as it moves along a perpendicular path. It will be a shelter to life’s tides, a safe place to regroup and regrow.
Consciousness hits the tar. The pitch layers catch hold and drag it down, ignoring its floundering mammoth cry.
I’ve got lines of concrete channelling through my face – temple to brow to nose to cheek. Those lines must have been laid in the night, crystals forming come morning.
Gravity got turned up last night. It wants me to ram my head against whatever ground lies beneath my feet, press myself into the dirt until concrete meets concrete.
There is no world outside the gritty throb that laps and overlaps from scalp to chin, bleaching all sound into a vacant whine.
My eyeballs are first to turn inward, burrowing into the meat of my brain. My brow threatens to collapse behind them, pulled toward the sucking black core that yearns to subsume my entirety.
Don’t disclose they advised. I have no tidy disclosure to make, no Latinate phrase to impress or Wikipedia page to authenticate.
I am unfranked.
I have a messy mouthful of words that stutter their way into the world. A tendency to tail away.
No it isn’t great, yes it does affect my working patterns.
Don’t read their expressions, don’t downplay.
I’ve got two-pilled dexterity of mouth, should have taken one, but the fear of pain was worse than a clumsy tongue.
I’ve got weevilling cramps riddling my face, eating into my brow.
What did she just say?
How can we make this role work?
Focus on outputs not hours in the office, let me pick my brain when it’s ripe not rotten, trust me, respect me, realise that this is worse for me than for you.
There’s so much love there. Two people who will literally sandwich me when I’m howling and bathed in eau du vomit. They will hold me fast against the strange forces that wreck my body. They will feed me, comfort me, walk for me, and help me scrape the bottom of the barrel for sticky dregs of laughter.
Home.
Time stops there. Away from the life I have built for myself, the people I have collected, the places I call my own. There live the ones who knew me first, from knee high upward. There are the ones who taught me, inspired me, keep me in their hearts even now. It is there that childhood memories are unpacked.
Home brings summer flowers and cool rooms, new grown frogs and an old purring lap blanket.
And yet a part of me asks, what then?
Is this forever?
Am I letting go of this life I’ve been building and falling a decade backward? Acceding to whatever it is that tears at my body?
Perhaps home must be given new lines to speak. I must dust it off, wipe away the sepia and see it in the light of the present.
Safe harbour in the midst of this ship-wrecking storm.
I was carrying out the arcane and unusual hobby of pulling on my pants – knickers, not trousers – on Thursday, when one of my sacroiliac joints gave a forbidding clunk.
Possibly a(nother) sign from the Universe, this one telling me not to wear pants? (On previous occasions I’ve been putting on trousers, reaching for things, drying my feet, playing catch, or plugging something in, so I guess those are all out too.)
I’m now marooned on my mattress like an upturned turtle (or like a beached walrus as my mother flatteringly suggests). Walking is currently a spine-drenching shriek-inducing slow drag. My neighbours must be thinking I’m having quite the time of it, given the gasps, moans, swearing and thunks I’ve been making when trying to get to the loo. At least alternate reality me is enjoying herself.
Notes for Future Self
Keep the loo roll holder topped up (or else no loo paper for you).
Move all necessities to lower cupboards (but not too low). Or raise the entire floor of the flat. Or get taller.
Stock more painkiller packs by your bed, ditto emergency food for stomach lining. Don’t eat emergency food in non-emergencies, idiot.
Keep antiperspirant next to your bed. For the love of all the gods.
Those fan remotes you thought were stupid? Turns out, not so stupid. Dig those out.
Take the rubbish out whenever possible so it doesn’t fester for days when you can’t move. Adopt a zero tolerance policy for flies.
Rig charger cables to loop over the top of the bed so you don’t spend fifteen minutes wriggling millimetre by millimetre to reach them.
Keep instant edible things in the flat that aren’t just raw tomatoes and celery.
Get a bottom buddy. [NB. Not what it sounds like] [NB2. Not much better than what it sounds like].
Medically Unexplained 