elliott h.
I do not sleep. I take Benedryl well before midnight, and fall asleep at 7:30am after sending an announcement to my students cancelling morning office hours and my afternoon class, and texting B to ask to postpone our midmorning conversation. I also inquire with him if he’d be interested in picking up more teaching next semester if I decide I cannot take on my full load. I need to make a decision soon. For six months, I’ve been nursing a gut infection that has affected every aspect of my being, most especially my capacity to show up as a generous teacher. I heave myself through the days, a shell in the waves that can’t quite make it to shore. How does one heal in this world. How does one heal as an adjunct.
Seems to me my autonomic nervous system has forgotten how to both “rest” and “digest” simultaneously. Nights when I should be “resting,” my stomach instead pulsates, sending pounding waves through my weakened body, which keep me awake. At 12:47am, I turn on my bedside light and decide to take a small dropper’s worth of an herbal supplement recommended to me by my herbalist sister, M. I turn off my light. At 1:58am, I turn on my light and try to read a few pages of Pachinko, most of which I read over the summer. I enjoyed it at first, its characters and pacing, but began to find the language lacking beauty (strangeness), and I associate the book with insomnia and illness. It’s taken me months to get through the final 50 pages. I stop making note of each instance I turn the light on and off. I thank my cells for their hard work, tell them you’ve done enough and it’s time to relax now. They don’t. At some point, I reread P’s work in the newest issue of Eternal Sections, seeking a comforting voice. “my insomnia feeds me useless pop,” she writes. For me, it’s the Fugees’s cover of “Killing Me Softly,” which had been playing in Trader Joe’s on Sunday evening. I spent too long in the Trader Joe’s. The song reentered my mind after I had masturbated with my finger probably around 3:00am. I thought that might help me tumble into slumber. It didn’t.
At 7:30am I fall asleep without my eye mask on, gray morning light pushing through the blinds. I sleep deeply enough to have a somewhat-complex dream: I’m about to get top surgery. The surgery is taking place in something like a hotel at night, and M is simultaneously getting a hysterectomy. We are being prepared for our surgeries together, swaddled robes and sheets. In the dream, I’m not quite sure why she’s getting a hysterectomy—I hadn’t realized she wanted or needed one—but I’m grateful for the companionship. Our parents are present (also some cousins in a fleeting party scene), and my mother seems to understand how badly I want and need this surgery. She is proud of and happy for me. I am overjoyed. In the dream, I text A a selfie before the surgeon enters the room. In the dream, we hadn’t been in communication for an unspecified amount of time—must have been a long time. In the dream, she responds immediately, How’s the weather in California? I explain to her that I was in the Midwest for the surgery because I could schedule it sooner here. Are you getting buttonhole or inverted-T? she asks. No, it’s double incision, I respond. Are you sure that’s what you want?
It's 10:07am when I awake. I remain in bed for another forty minutes, unable to face the day right away.
I make the bed. I put some clothes together to take to the shower. I notice M called a moment ago. I call her back. Her class was cancelled and she’s walking to a café. “When you come visit”—she’s living in Missoula—“I’ll take you here.” I don’t tell her about the dream. I say, “I cancelled my class.” I say, “I’m so tired.” I am so tired, to say the least, though I won’t stop plodding on in this years-long process of total annihilation, which seems to have reached a nadir. I keep returning to this quote of Pema Chödrön: “Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible in us be found.” Okay. When I talked to her last Thursday on the way to F’s, M suggested that that which I’m panning for, as if I’m panning for gold, is not a coherent sense of self, which doesn’t exist, nor is it love for said coherent sense of self, which doesn’t exist, but a sense of the sky piece in me—an ineffable, infinite facet of the sky found in all beings, such as Herakles, as noted by Anne Carson in her “Lecture on the History of Skywriting,” which M had been listening to just before we talked. It’s the “indestructible” thing. Today I am simply too tired to make an attempt at locating and loving my indestructible piece of sky. I am supposed to pick up an anti-diarrheal prescription, and that might be the most concrete task I can accomplish. In the future, I know I will be able to move through the dark wood with greater vigor—write poetry, say; be in tender, generative community; give, help, defend—after I’ve slept. I have been writing already. This is writing. Is this the weird sky. Later in the day, I will contact my primary care physician to see about prescription-strength sleep aids.
After I shower, I decide I will restart my second course of Rifaximin, which I had stopped taking five days ago because it was giving me severe dry mouth and I thought it might be affecting my ability to sleep. No, it’s not the antibiotics. I make the same breakfast (it’s now near noon) I’ve eaten since June, and I’m getting sick of it: oatmeal with banana, walnuts, ground flax, cinnamon. I grind fresh ginger into hot water. I sit down to draft a simple asynchronous assignment to my students, but instead start writing this entry. I will spend much of the day turning back to this entry. Writing is living, not apart from it. Writing is thinking is living fastened in a continuous present, and I love that one can return to this fastened state of presentness repeatedly via reading—a feedback loop that can enlarge the potentiality of existence. I am grateful to give over much of my day to this—lucid prose, which does feel so measured, less surprising than poetry. I seem to have intentions, and I can’t let go of the idea of audience in the same way I can while writing poetry. Over the past two weeks, I have written the first complete poem I’ve finished since I closed out a larger project over the summer. I will spend much of the day turning back to this poem, too, tinkering with and learning from it: a semi-colon or “, then”? (I continue to waffle.) Do I keep or scrap its current-last word, “freely”? (Scrap.) If a ghost is aching, what is the sound of its moan—“O” or “Ee”? Overall, the poem is flush with /ē/ words. The poem teaches me that the long-e is the sound of reaching. Throwing a line out repeatedly and hoping for a goddamn catch (tho, it’s the throwing that really matters). I understand now that the aching and reaching are not intertwined, and they effect different sounds. The ghost will moan O. The poem casts /ē/ again and again. All poems reach along a sonic landscape, point toward the unknown or ineffable (often, I think, indescribable magnitudes of love); this particular poem is especially loud about it. Eeeeeee.
At the dining room table, I answer a few student emails and eventually draft and post the asynchronous assignment, moving between Word documents and Canvas. I spend the day at the dining room table, not interested in working at my desk. It’s brighter in here. I keep coming back to this document and continue to avoid my enormous backlog of grading.
Time bleeds at the table. I text with L, who suggests a long walk in the woods by myself, and to try to have some compassion for myself. Around 3:30pm, I realize I should eat more, and am pleased to find in the fridge a turkey sandwich I had made myself yesterday to take for lunch today. My present self thanks my past self: compassion? I eat it, a hard-boiled egg, and a clementine. I write this entry. T checks in. She’s reading Moby-Dick in her Great Books course and loves it. I don’t think she’s saying this just to please me—me who is me in part because of Moby-Dick. Moby-Dick, a piece of my sky piece. Says she bonded with her professor when she stayed after class to discuss the connection she feels exists between Ishmael and Lady Bird. I am so proud of her. I miss her more than I can express in a text, and I don’t want to be overbearing, and the conversation remains superficial. Says they spent their class period discussing the opening paragraph of Chapter 1. I tell her if I were to open a bookstore someday, I would call it Substitute Books, as in: books are “substitute for pistol and ball.” Genius, she responds. I ask her why she enjoyed tailgating at the Bills game. Everyone was so joyous! It’s why I like sports. Everyone is so nice and relating…In Buffalo when somebody says go bills you must respond by saying go bills. And free food
When heart vibrations dip under baseline, I text F and ask for a ritual that can start small and expand as my capacity expands. She responds immediately: Go outside and try to stand facing the sun so you can feel it on your face. Take 3 belly breaths, prolonging the exhales (I know it’s corny but it works). Try to do this in the morning if you can. To expand, make it part of a daily walk practice. If you’re up to it, I think this would pair well with a daily writing ritual: Writing 3 words per day. It could also be a nice thing to think about during the day, trying to find your 3 words. To expand, write 3 lines. I will breathe my three breaths the following day in the middle of a stone labyrinth on campus, and the breaths will loosen a wound valve, and I will cry as three bros walk by. By the end of the day, the words will be unfinished, tip, and attention. Compassion: I have made difficult decisions in my life that have put me in a position to have many incredible beloveds, including beloved friends and stepchildren.
I grade some (not enough). Not long after the turkey sandwich, I decide to eat an early dinner, hoping eating early will help with my “rest and digest” problem. I bake a large sliver of salmon with lemon juice and zest, butter, fresh dill, and salt and pepper perfectly. Heat up rice and sweet potatoes from last night. But for five pieces of sweet potato, I eat it all.
A little after 8:00pm, I decide to leave the house and walk to CVS to pick up the anti-diarrheal medication. I already know I won’t take it—it was prescribed last week during a particularly intense and painful bout of diarrhea, which has since passed—but I don’t want to make more work for the pharmacy technicians by leaving it to languish in the plastic bins. I also think I should leave the house at least once during this particular Day in Philadelphia. After I step out, I say hello to Barbara, the neighbor who smokes on her porch a few houses up from mine. I am surprised to see others out walking dogs, finishing dinner in restaurants—it feels so late. It is a little after 8:00pm. Along 43rd, leaves are finally dropping in earnest, and shadows begin to dapple the sidewalk in winter patterns.
Face wash, Metamucil, anti-diarrheal medication. On the way home, a long-haired gray and white cat sits on the stone wall near the entrance to Clark Park at Baltimore and 43rd. I stop, sigh, and say hello. It stares at me, and I acknowledge its beauty. It bolts when I move towards it. I keep walking home, and then decide to turn around to try to find it in the brush. I think I should take its picture so I can show it to you here. I don’t find it.
When I get home, I respond to the LCSW who wrote me a support letter for top surgery last year before my primary insurance fucked me over. My insurance is finally sorted out and I should be able to move forward with scheduling the surgery, so long as the letter is updated. I wonder if she writes support letters for phalloplasty—I will inquire when we next speak. I then fill out a name change petition form. I schedule a haircut for Friday evening. I take two full droppers of the herbal sleeping potion. I get ready for bed. I’m in bed by 10:30pm. At midnight, I am still awake.
Currently, elliott (@enemydickinson) is an insomniac with a gut infection. They teach poetry and composition at Philly-area universities.
