Here is what is this about. I don’t know what I’m about. Most people ignore me now and I’m not sure why, but I’m pretty sure I don’t want to know why, and even if I knew why, I wouldn’t remember anyway. I’m a handful on my best of days. My best of days happened decades ago. I can hardly live with myself. And I’m not. Nobody is.
Time is something that speeds by on a billion schedules, and patterns its way around the world in an interactive lacy web. Life billows. I get tired easily and right now I’m busy imagining the reality of slitting my wrists. But that sounds like a lot of work and I’m tired.
I’m this tired because I hardly eat. Also, my brain has stopped functioning, which is exhausting. For once, this isn’t on purpose. The soldiers battling in my brain. I haven’t blasted them with shotguns full of vodka and smokey bullets of xanax. I haven’t made it to the store yet. I haven’t made it anywhere at all.
I have a past. Once, I had a mother and a father and a sister. I never knew my sister, but I heard she was a perfect baby. I had a first husband. They’re all dead. Ken’s dead, too. Today, Koko died. I wish I drive by Koko’s woodland home in Woodside, like I did every day when I lived as her neighbor. I want to be driving, in my 4Runner, by her old home, I wish I could see my old home, I wish I could see where my memories were born.
I am overwhelmed, usually because I’m on the floor, and everything is tall. I’m so hungry that when I try to eat I just puke. My throat and my fingers have been on a break. I feel like I’m washing away. I feel like a melting pile of snow. I feel like I should be in the forest, climbing redwood trees. I feel like I need a nap but I can’t sleep. I want to die. I want to live. I want to live a different life. I want to write something good. I want to write it well.
But I don’t know what good is, and things are never well enough for some people. I want to stop dwelling in the comprehensive state of my racing pulse, my speeding heartbeat. My mother’s voice.
I am forty-three. My mother died when she was forty-three. She died right after surgery to remove her brain tumor. The last time I saw her, alive, she was on a gurney, sedated, her long, curly brown hair looking like it was being mulled into a cap. I watched her being pushed, under a blanket, on the gurney, through blue hospital doors, that closed. Quietly. That was the last time I saw my mother breathing. Two days later I saw my mother again. She was in a hospital room, dead. Her bed was against the east facing wall, and there was only one bed in the room.
I learned that there were always a single bed in those rooms—the dead people rooms. Dead people and machines that should be beeping and moving. The machines in those rooms were also dead. I felt so shaken, like when I had stood behind the shuddering glass at the one-hour-photo, where I worked, last year. That was the ’89 earthquake. Everything shook, rolled, dropped, broke. Seventeen seconds of rolling destruction. And invisible force. It was such a quiet, deafening shaking.
Like now. Like inside of me now. Looking at my dead mother. Like now. Me. Standing in a ray of sunlight, on the weirdly soft hospital floor. Always, hospital floors were softly quiet. The wheels of wheelchairs and gurneys were loud. Rolling around, squeaking. Everything was always, it seemed, rolling.
I felt more shaken by how little I felt as I looked at her, sleeping without breathing. She still had that cap on her head. It was the only time I ever saw my mother’s hair look so lifeless. Today, I am alive, technically. I often wonder if my mother and I had brains that weren’t built to work for more than forty-three years.
I want to see flowers. I want to feel warm water. I want to feel waves crashing against my back. I feel stupid. I feel smart. Do I feel smart because I’m so stupid? “Feelings” are supposed to be shown, not told, when writing. I want to feel happy. I want to eat. I want to know. I want my hair to not fall out. I need a break.
I need a brain. I want a break that lasts me the rest of my life and beyond. I don’t want to remember being eight years old with my gymnastic teacher’s hands in my pants. I’ve been working for something since I walk to my 3rd grade classroom, in Eureka, Ca. I walked out the front door of our house on Myrtle Street, turned right and walked five blocks to Lafayette Elementary School, on Park Street.
I want my hair back. I want my life back. I want a sandwich. I want ice-cream. I want to eat without puking into the nearest toilet. I want to sleep. Forever. I want to live. Happily. Indefinitely. I want to hold my newborn son, every one of these days.
I want to be in love and mean it. I want to hide in a lake. I want to hide with fish. I want to write about people who exist, and who are good. Instead I’m swimming fiercely in shallow water. My knees hit rocks. I taste blood.
I remember the metallic, plastic, blasting sound of my typewriter exploding on concrete seconds after I dropped it from the wooden 2nd floor deck, on which I stood. Single black keys with white single letters then scattered around the typewriter, wordless on the grainy grey ground.
I remember brown leaves drifting around my brown typewriter, like ballerinas, floating in the blasted air. I want to see the brown leaves drifting across the scuffled concrete of my patio. I want to look between the brown patio stairs and see the ground. I want to hear the shuffling sound of shoes as people walk on the other side of the fence, unaware of what they’re missing over here.
Michelle O’Kane 