Sickness

I woke up this morning at four, my usual time, feeling more run-down than usual. The météo calls for rain all this week; I glanced at the rather ominous lightening purple morning skies while transplanting bitter sneezeweed and wild asters I had taken from our walk a few days earlier into little pots. The sneezeweed appears to be taking transplanting better than the asters. When I left for work at a quarter til six the rain had yet to begin. I checked the plants in the greenhouse over my morning coffee; it began pouring shortly thereafter. I spent the morning listening to vaporwave I had snuck in and arranging Boston ferns. By the time I finished my morning coffee break at nine-thirty I was shivering and had the chills. I suspect my general fatigue with my work schedule has weakened my immune system already compromised by the hormonal fluctuations of my perimenopause. So I left.

A pipe burst in the kitchen during the repair of our sink and flooded both our kitchen and that of our downstairs neighbor; I spent considerable time mopping up the flood with my husband. He left for work after lunch and I was finally able to sleep somewhat, over watching a documentary about Creutzfeldt-Jakob Syndrome with my dog...I'm not sure how I will feel tomorrow. I'm writing this by candleight at my desk somewhat flushed; the rain has finally stopped and the house is silent for the time being. I thought about working more on my latest short story; the draft has sat untouched for several days on my computer screen. There are so many people anticipating reading it that I almost feel guilty having writer's block for the moment; it's my first short story in twenty years.

Strange Sunday

When I lived in downtown Durham in the mid-aughts, there was a building I used to pass everyday on Gregson Street on my way to the Brightleaf District, a building I called Strange Sunday. It was a rather plain stuccoed building, at the time abandoned, but I used to stop and stare at the pill-like windows, fascinated. (It was the same feeling I used to get as a child in New Salem, North Dakota, when I would wander towards Main Street to stare at a series of amethyst-colored glass blocks that had been oddly cemented into a patch of sidewalk, filling my childhood brain with halting fascination.) I either pictured--or dreamt, nearly two decades later I'm not sure which--the door opening to a peach marbled foyer and a carved spiral staircase, next to which sat a tall vase with filled with coral-colored lilies. In writing this post I was dismayed to discover that my photographs of this building were among the thousands lost of my life in Trinity Park when I lived in near-abject poverty; my writings on this subject have also long-since disappeared. At the time--perhaps in my cynicism--I didn't think anyone would ever care about them, let alone care to read them; it's fitting, perhaps, that the Durham of 2023 that bears little resemblance to the city I loved when I was young should have taken with it records of a life once lived that I will never get back. 

I thought about the Strange Sunday building today for the the first time in years; I remember it as an old friend to whom I never got to say goodbye, in my present shock at the post-pandemic decimation of the Brightleaf District, it is something perhaps one day will no longer exist. One of the hardest parts of my new reality in recovery is that the places I often turned to to keep me grounded in the depths of my illness are no longer there. I no longer live in the apartment I called home for the years I often went to bed hungry and had only library books and a shortwave radio for entertainment on endless summer nights; they will most certainly be torn down someday, as will Strange Sunday. 

I miss the feeling of fascination. Of wonder. I miss dreams that were so vivid they were almost tangible; the feeling of cam in early spring, the smell of Asbury Methodist in long-forgotten rooms, the richness of carved wood, colors which scattered through stained glass windows down long corridors. It is still in Durham somewhere--somewhere lost among the façade of the Snow Building, flickering in the street lamps of the church yards on Trinity Avenue. I hope to find it again someday.

Fulfillment

I am writing this on a sunny afternoon in our cozy little apartment; my dog is at my feet, our dwarf hamster, Timothy, is asleep in his nest. My husband has left for work, a gifted bouquet of yellow carnations sits on the dining room table in his absence. Over the past year I've driven myself almost to the brink of madness in losing M. and dealing with my divorce, merely existing among the hundreds of parcels and orders of my last job, before finally leaving to make a living tending to flowers, my thoughts nestled among the pervenche and yarrow and camellias. This job has given me a respite from the sorrow and grief of the last few years, not that my thoughts don't often drift to what once was--but I have discovered over the past few months that time has come to soften the pain that remains. 

I have always struggled with emptiness--in most people I think it would register as boredom, but I'm not really bored--I just feel empty inside. This is a peculiar trait most people with borderline personality disorder share, a trait that often manifests itself in self-harm, or addiction, or promiscuity. It is often said that people with this disorder act out in order to feel something other than nothing at all; I've spent the last decade of my life fleeing from the feeling with alcohol and often dangerous relationships, sometimes with lovers, more often than not with strangers. I have come to realize in my near middle age that contentment--so much more than happiness--is something fleeting, something I hold in my hands briefly, before watching it slip away, never understanding how to make it stay.

I have half a dozen books I've been trying to read for the past year; books on esoteric topics and interests not many people understand; histories on tuberculosis sanitariums, biographies of silent film stars, books about death. I thought about reading today, but I don't have much patience; I am often unable to sit still since so much has changed in my life; I feel as though I don't have the peace of mind to sit and read. I have been thus occupying my spare time with a growing collection of houseplants that I tend to lovingly with my husband; I often find pulling the dead leaves and wilted flowers cathartic, half wishing I could pluck out my own quiet discontentment and watch it scatter with the wind. 

Most evenings I take walks to the pond with my dog to see the geese; a blue heron often comes by to sit with us among the stillness--I watch for him every night, hoping he will return. In a slower part of town than the bustling near-downtown neighborhood in which I used to live with my ex afternoons settle among pine trees and the call of morning doves; a barred owl has come to live in the woods behind my work just blocks from our apartment, and I often hear it in the darkness of the mornings as I water the rose bushes. There are new wild flowers in this part of town, too--gone are the nightshade that used to fascinate me, replaced with sneezeweed, Carolina roses, goldenrod, Queen Anne's lace and a small purple flower I have yet to identify. I've started photographing my discoveries, each one eventually carefully researched and often discussed at length with my husband, who thus far doesn't seem to share my fascination. I've started baking and cooking more, too, from errands at local shops with exotic elixirs and spices that I've discovered, eager to take them home with me. 

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I just returned home and am currently sitting with my dog against a backdrop of spiced candles and the hazy blue of late afternoon. The house is silent except for a small fan sitting on the table; my husband will be home in a few hours, and I'm contemplating whether or not to continue watching the documentary we had started a few days ago. With my job outside in the hot Carolina sun, I often fall asleep whenever anything is on the television, curled up with my dog for yet another evening of quiet solitude. Maybe I will find contentment somewhere tonight. I struggle not to think of M., my thoughts drifting to our last summers together. The coffee shop sits vacant now in the Brightleaf District; if only I could return one last time to finish the crossword puzzle together over a lemon snap...ti voglio bene...

Recovery and Uncertainty

Lately I find myself drifting towards anonymity, an uneasy solitude that stretches endlessly towards a vast unknown, an inevitability that comforts me as much as leaves me aghast at its existence. When my ex and I separated last year, addiction had not yet released its hold on me, and I was determined to let it do what it will; die or not, I had yet to discover there was a life beyond that which I had known for so long. I was apathetic to my fate, and complicit in my own destruction; years after the initial pleasure of my dependency had worn off it had become the only certainty in my life. I think my ex had been almost at peace with watching me drown; but when I walked out of our life together I was walking into a new reality--R. was there. In the darkness I hadn't realized he had been there all along, waiting, hand outstretched. And as he took my hand to pull me out of the abyss we ran towards an uncertain future.

I had been in and out of hospital for a decade. Addiction had slowly eaten away at me, and this past December I had become gravely ill. It was something I didn't discuss, the elephant in the room, something I desperately tried to sweep under the rug. In the years since I had started drinking my body had slowly become allergic; in the tattered remains of this last Christmas I had been nauseous for nearly a week, my body wracked with chills and a deep ache that seemed to live in my bones. My parents drove across town to see me, bedridden."I'm done drinking," I told them. And then, "When you leave please take the alcohol with you." R. had always told me that some day I would get to the point where I would break--it hadn't broken me, to be sure; I had broken myself, defiant and clinging to what little life I had in me. I awoke the next morning to an uneasy silence.  

Over the past few months I've thought of alcohol very little--not that it doesn't cross my mind in the depths of my depression--but I've come to see it as something that once was, a relationship that has ended, something I used to love but now struggle to see how. I don't need my addiction anymore--not that I ever truly did--I admit that sometimes I am afraid it will find me again, and that someday I will be too weak to resist it. But I can't dwell on that, now. Fear is what drove me to its side in the first place. I have come too far to sit and think about what was on the other side. And yet I still often struggle to fill my head with something beyond the emptiness. The struggle of recovery isn't about those difficult moments when I crave that which I used to need; it's those silent moments of nothingness, of aching, longing for something--anything--to occupy my mind. Not at work. Not when I am with R. But when I am alone with my thoughts, drowning in an uncertain evening. And there are so many uncertain evenings.

✦✦✦✦

I married R. last month, the only other human being on earth that has ever loved me for me, accepted me without hesitation, and understood my fragility in the face of a society in which neither of us have ever fit. At last we are alone together in our solitude, together in the silence that settles all around us when we shut the door to the world at the end of the day and hold one another in the darkness. That I would find my other half after a lifetime of running from a world that rejected my strangeness amazes and humbles me. If we were the last two souls on earth we would find ourselves no more isolated than we had been when others existed; it is he and I now, facing eternity, either in this life or the next, content to be with one another as much as we are content to pretend the rest of the world doesn't exist. In the depths of my addiction and depression I peered over the edge of my own existence and was shocked to discover that it wasn't darkness on the other side but the reflection of someone I had known all along, loved in secret and needed more than life itself. I needed him, to feel that I myself was needed--that my existence, as unconventional as it has been, meant something, that the madness inside my own head was tolerable because he gave me permission to exist.