Out of it, completely, putting soup to my mouth at the dinner table. Beats of recognition that I am not, and then I am, here. Lemon, salt, something on the television which I don’t remember. Sitting up in the night, dark sweat and shivering. Wanting to wake, wanting to sleep, wanting to evade the physical completely and turn into the throughline that connects the books I’ve been reading in muffled succession. Undeniable, God-given constellations; Didion talking about Lisa Kasabian in The White Album, then Cline re-imagining her in The Girls, then a map route to Didion’s Franklin Avenue house in a NYT article. This to this to this, the lesson being that transformation is not a thing of magic but sense, consequence.
I try it anyway, convincing myself after the fifth day of growing sickness that it isn’t a physical malady but spiritual. I play a video of ‘healing frequencies’ on my phone while humming. I pray and give thanks for the banalities that in lack would be my truest desires: the bed, the shower, the almost-sweet medicine, the tissues, the heater, the humidifier, the silence. Mum burns esfand on the stove, a big purply heap, wafting the smoke over my chest and head. Jordan gets close and I tell him not to, but then he put his palms on my hot cheeks and says it wrong: in sickness and in love. Another beautiful spell. Three wishes, three heel clicks, three pumpkins? Three slow finites, the heart beating low and with effort. The white hot persisting, no fast track to the after-fever. Instead, the animal demand to dream, dream again. The blanket pulled over my nose for a warm pocket of air. Words read and spoken of inaudible meaning. The clouded sky, dishes piled, sought-for good omens. The body turning against itself, the cry of self-preservation in one part misunderstood by the other as an attack of what is most dear. The spirit collapsing, asking against the suffocation of the morning sheets, why are you doing this to me?
By the time the fever breaks, and I step outside to the front of the house, I see the oak by our mailbox has turned its gold leaves garnet. Fluttering red handprints along its bough and branches, none yet dropping though it is deep into autumn. Real magic. Smoke and mirrors magic. Something happening in an instant while you were looking elsewhere magic. Making my own throughlines and lessons: look away to fix it.
At the sink and scrubbing, the cough persists, but the delirium blurs. What did I see? What did I imagine? In that paleness, what fears were convinced to me as the truth exposed? Crying in an appointment, stepping away from the monitor to splash water on my face. A song from a playlist sent to me by a reader who saw into my heart, replaying: Only You Know by Cornelia Murr (cause I know that you've been waiting, been such a long time that you've been waitin). The backyard at night, my dog, black like shadow. The neighbour’s upstairs light on, scalloped blinds half-drawn. Rough knitting wool webbing around my fingers. Scribbling in half-sleep: all wrong, all twisted, the dead root of a bent tree. Forever as the ugliest taunt.
A different magic: to believe none of it. Pathologise nothing. Let lay to waste utterances of sickness and its false promises. Didion: where there is no anchor, you get to reinvent the moorings everyday.
I’m short-breathed on our walk. Throwing my head back on a chair after and closing my eyes to the sun. A woman calls me, my dad had given her a copy of my zine. She is elderly and talks in a quivering whisper, but comes through clearly when she says: your words moved me. It is so boring to be self-deprecating even if you mean it, so I thank her, over and over. It’s been quite a journey for you, hasn’t it? Outside, two birds land on a telephone wire, then separate, flying off into different directions. Yeah, it has. Being seen in this shaky flight: the throughline that makes me.