We went out of the country for about a week, January 2017. For about two days, framing that week, we were crossing the International Date Line, being in the clouds above several oceans, feeling cramped and cranky, dried out and faux-hungry.
When we got home, there was no real reason I could not go to work the next day. However, after 10 days of relative sobriety, the kind of sobriety that is called normal by most people, my impulse was the same as it always is in this household. And it's always an insane choice, the textbook sort, the kind that expects a different outcome and doesn't care to remember it will be the same horrible thing — because the thrill of remembered oblivion is a favored carnival ride. There are lights; there is music, warmth and a cradle when it's over.
It was easy enough to plead for another day off. Reasonable on the outside.
I did go to work the following day. I don't recall much but an intense sinus headache, a mild nausea that could be well attributed to the ending of "travel stomach."
Four days later, somewhere in February, that stomach is still not working properly. I hardly feel hungry, every food is repulsive and gives me a headache just to think of. And when I think about my health, I grow anxious. I worry I will never be well. I worry I will never be able to walk.
I walk downstairs to the kitchen. I make it, but I have to sit down. I am perpetually self-monitoring for a heart attack.
I check my blood pressure and find that I'm still, as I have been for a year, at high risk for stroke.
The great thing about being on vacation was that I didn't have heart palpitations. I didn't have to worry about being hungry. Food was plentiful and provided. I am not sure I was ever actually hungry. I ate and started to doubt the one previously reliable factor of my body.
I walked a lot. We wore our feet out on bumpy sidewalks, quick-paced traffic-threading, museums with tile floors. There really is no carpet in Vietnam. There are mats outside the toilets/bathrooms — usually the same room and with no water-barrier around anything that sprays. Poorly graded floors make for perpetual puddles. The Japanese keep these rooms separate and also have specific shoes for the toilet. I appreciate that now.
Abundance includes having banana trees like weeds everywhere, jackfruit in the front yard, coconuts. Our trees here make bitter acorns and difficult-to-eat walnuts.
Seeing fields of pineapple was a treat. One reason they are expensive abroad: they live in rows accessed by little boats and require an individual human to cut each one individually. Rice, I have seen, is likewise planted, by hand, but its yield is not 1:1. Is that the difference?
I didn't eat that much rice. The rice I remember rejecting outright was on the airplanes and very un-Asian in flavor and how it was cooked. Of course, if I based wedge potatoes on how All Nippon Airlines makes them, I would likewise reject them, too; but we gravitate toward the familiar.
Thinking of the airplane meals still makes me nauseous.
A lot of things make me nauseous right now. I still gag when I brush my teeth, and sometimes, it's worse.
The bottom of my digestive system is a wreck. Mild, but persistent.
When I slept last night, I could smell mustard. I haven't eaten that for days, and I still smell it, and it's confusing to me.
Vietnam is full of smells I can't describe. I can only hint that they are intense, constant and constantly changing. Any good one will be followed quickly by another terrible one. Not that chickens cooking or chickens tied up in a bunch on the street-market ground make intrinsically bad or good smells. Sweet crab meat under fingernails yields to yet another stenchy toilet. The sea — well, we never made it to the sea. All the rivers, though, they are brown, there are many, and they are unapologetically floating with trash.
Sensory overload in the past would render me either snappish or reclusive. In the face of so much hospitality, I did not have those easy, selfish options, but I also did not regret their absence. Is my bedridden, congested state — complete with the confusion of gut issues (compounded by a menstrual cycle that is depressing me with its irregularity and vengeance) — something I can attribute to "stress"?
And why can't I handle stress?
I'm barely functioning. I made it to the shower about 20 hours ago, and I used a motor vehicle, because we needed toilet paper and I needed an excuse to buy a box of wine. I avoided one of the most positive and entertaining events that happens in my neighborhood last night, a pre-Mardi Gras march (with food, costumes, joy, instruments and a little bit of fire) just because I had no receptor whatsoever that was open to something so social. Even the gentle kind of anonymous socializing of a life-forward, happy-centric, full-moon event. With food and costumes and instruments, joy.
My hair, it has not been washed since last Sunday night, when we prepared to get up again at 3 a.m.
I haven't gone this long before, and I haven't had such "good" results. The scalp is not an oozing, scabby mess. Maybe I just can't smell anything with this sinus condition. It is so very dry here, though.
Loneliness is strong right now.
Before we left, one, then another, told me I was (my words, I'm grouping) in the way. They who had embraced my being, my spirit, my body, my time — they both determined that what I was giving was not wanted, was an obstruction, was theirs to terminate without discussion.
We are all independent beings. We do wish to be included in decisions, even if they are unilateral, when the outcome includes us. I would agree. I did agree. I wasn't ready to agree. In one case it was a matter of four minutes. After an emotional push that took five hours that I was pushed to (and happy to) make. They let themselves off with an "I hurt people and I'm sorry you are one."
I knew they were not mentally stable. But the joy we brought each other, I thought, was special. It felt different to me. I gave differently because of it. Door opened, now shut.
That same door, once unsealed, made my heart "game" for another, more physical, less spiritual, wooing. My resistance was intellectual; my behavior was, by the textbook of _________, wrong.
When this particular they got out of the more intense place of their own grief and noticed I shouldn't be included in any recovery, they didn't use the word "mistake." I know.
My regrets include: feeling pain.
I am too lonely to call close friends. I am too fragile to try anything. I can barely use my voice. I don't have much to say on social media. I have been saying for weeks, months, that I feel blank. I am a study in non-reaction. I have been killing off every feeling for my whole life, and I must have gotten suddenly very good at it?
Accumulation. Wet sands of tiny chips of every rock slowly drying up above the tide mark. Starting to blow away.
