After another day from hell, 25 mgs of Tramadol, 15 mgs of Ambien, 25 mgs of Topamax, and I\’m fading fast into the forty degree weather where I will sleep with the shrinking heating pad that reaks of sex which is not mine.
I haven\’t been interested in sex, music, or socializing since I left for Seattle. This could be invasion of the body snatchers without me knowing it, because somehow I\’m not me anymore. I\’m working my ass off, busy, don\’t want to see anyone, don\’t want to talk, don\’t want to go out, don\’t want to hear music, don\’t want to have a drink, don\’t want to have anything to do with anyone who\’s not right here in front of me.
The tunnel is rising up slowly around my peripheral vision from the drugs. My body is finally relaxing. For the first time today it is not utterly painful to sit, but I still cannot manage to straighten my legs enough to take a shower. I\’ve been wearing the same clothes for two days, but I got a lot done today. Tomorrow I get a second opinion and new drugs. Drugs, I need more drugs. To make me go away. I think all that is left of me is the pain, because when it subsides, all I do is sleep. When I wake up, the pain comes back. But I have lost what used to try to coexist with it. I lost the young girl, the personality. Now I am the responsible adult who makes sure the dishes are washed and the clothes put away and the papers filed and the phone calls returned and the new design details hashed out and everything before Will gets home.
Can\’t remember the last time I had fun, and I can\’t remember the last time I cared.
Society completely conflicts with what my body tells me, to the point where I no longer feel confident in society and do not want society to come see me. POOF, be gone, leave me alone. I am not wallowing and feeling bad about myself and you\’re blind if you can\’t see that reading text books without being in school is still giving yourself an education.
The last thing I can recall being interested in is sinking down into the city\’s April mud and lying there until the May sun comes out and I am baked and fired into place. Then I will be a part of the city forever, until some developer decides to plow me over and build another coffee house on my land. If I get lucky, maybe they would build it on me.
When the developers reach the end of the \”frontier,\” will its current inhabitants be ready to meet them head on and hold them up in a convincing manner? We must all take real roots; with the severe lack of green in developing D.C., conservation would fight to help you keep your feet firmly planted in the swamp. Watch for leeches, watch for West Nile, but build the land back up the way it was meant to.
Sedatives really make you not make sense, but I have already been hallucinating all day, anyway, so this seems to still be a logical, though self-involved idea for performance art. My feet go deep into the sludge and they aren\’t coming out. I\’ll listen to the trees and make friends with the RCP men, and eventually I\’ll turn into the next Chandra Levy. My skull is easy to identify, however, so you might want to grab it and give it to someone who will appreciate it in their living room or something. I don\’t want to be buried in a box, I don\’t want to be cremated and dumped. Fry my fat from my bones, pull it back, and then give my bones to the folks who will use them properly. I think my mom\’s dog would enjoy the femurs. My skull would look pretty swank in Mark\’s apartment. Will\’s walls would be much improved with my entire spine wired across the wall. Cadavers. I want to make art from cadavers, but only if they come from me.
They\’re going to be running MRIs of my skull and my ass soon to compare them to the damage they found in my spine. I would like to get really good doctors who work like archeaologists and can say the injury happened when I was 13… January of 1995, when I had the first back pains that put me through the emergency room. Find those tests, compare them. It\’s true. It\’s not all in my head. It\’s not just the FMS. It turns out that my back really is collapsing in on itself the way my mind often feels as though it is. Maybe those two are tied together.
My health is more fucked than I am. I still need shoes before I can get fucked. Dammit. And I hate lawyers and all that legalese that confuses me. TALK SLOW TO ME, BABY, my IQ fools you, I do not process in that manner, I cannot figure out what you mean when you use so many words in one sentence. Slower. Dumb it down to my level. Make it the last time. The last time I promised, no more of this. This sure does look like the end, doesn\’t it?
All by myself, surrounded by my files and sitting in pain and realizing that god, this is a relief but it doesn\’t make things better, it makes them worse, you assholes gave me hope for two years and now you\’re saying that is gone and I sold all my FMS books and am trying to move on. What am I going to do with my life now that it\’s official that I\’m a gimp-for-life and my social security appointed doctors say that there is nothing they can do to help me. What if I try to do something to help myself? Can you help that?
I\’m not making any sense to anyone but myself and Charlotte at this point. There was supposed to be a big happy surprise this weekend. Maybe I can still do it.
