Angels with two heads, bellies - split open

pretending at pretending

1.

A chewed pill is always bitter. You know this if like me you can’t swallow pills and so you’re always asking can I crush it? Can I drink it? Luckily, I have a lot of pharmacist friends who can not only swallow pills but also dispense them, so they either say yes or no and then I know for certain.

Alongside the medication, my particular ailment requires a very specific diet that isn’t unlike starvation. Low-carb low-sugar no onion no garlic no eggs no legumes gluten free dairy free fun and joy free. I must eat like a cockroach - in secret from the human of myself and low to the ground. The pros are that I lose weight. The cons are that I’m hungry a lot of the time. But again, the pros are that I lose weight! It sounds like a bad joke only because I’m sincere. I am after all a woman in a world of winners and losers, and the loose jeans make me feel like a winner. My sick body can also be a good body.

I do not wake and worry about being late to work. Instead, I’ve been wasting time in the in-between. You need to be there to make something, but when you’re there you’re not here, and so it’s very hard to be concerned about things you should be, and easiest to be rattled by things that don’t matter to other people, to those with “a real grip on things”. I spend a while, there, in the quiet (it really does need to be quiet), reading Madame Bovary slowly, thinking about evil, specifically how I don’t believe in it, so I’m not scared of ghosts and things falling off the walls. I imagine explaining my reasoning to somebody; that ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are just pretend, and you don’t have to pretend the way someone else does. You can pretend according to your own rules. I mull it over, buy the expensive dairy-free cheese. Try and decipher the symbols in my coffee cup.

On a warm Sunday we come across a lizard. It’s wide and slow and kind of depressingly unsightly, all alone, shimmying down this suburban street towards an empty lot on four tiny legs. Some of my neighbours come out and stare at him too. How did it even get here? We ask each other, meaning across the main road and not in general, so it’s very funny and not at all existential. It’s a shingleback, my neighbour says. Harmless. It sticks out its blue tongue to argue otherwise, not knowing we have Google. Google says the stumpy tail is so it looks like it has two heads. Google says it belongs in grasslands. Google says it’s the only type of lizard known to be monogamous, mating for life with one partner.

2.

In an alternate reality - one without Google - the lizard would appear as an omen. A lost two-headed serpent, travelling backwards and forwards, signifying - what? Some type of impending, unending ruin. Ungoverned damnation. I would transform into an insect for real and it would eat me, and that would be another prophecy in and of itself. Like, perdition is nigh; consume or be consumed. The hungry would be compelled to listen, the starved convinced they should abstain, and it wouldn’t really matter in the end -

3.

Because like I said, that’s just pretend. In this life I look at the lizard and think, you poor hideous loner, not saying it with my tongue that is stained orange from the chewed pills.

1.

The thing about most doctors is, they never want to send you for tests unless you’re dying, and sometimes not even then. They really do only want the cockroaches - those with survival built in. But why the hell would a cockroach need a doctor?

Lately, I’ve been starting to feel that every good-bad body is its own thing. Claiming power over it is assuming blame of all its great and terrible states, and even worse is presuming intentionality; that your body is capable of doing things to you with reason. To cast yourself as a survivor of your own body is another game of pretend, one in which you must imagine many things, primarily yourself, as cruel. Every rule after becomes one of self-betrayal, committing yourself to always suffering a punishment that is double fold. It hurts because you’re guilty. It hurts because you’re innocent. It hurts because you’re innocent but guilty in a way only you know. These are the stories intended to make sense of chaos, and still, it hurts.

2.

I listen to a podcast about mothers whose epidurals failed during their c-sections. The women describe in detail how they were forced to endure excruciating pain while the doctors ignored them, calling it “pressure” instead of what it really was: agony. Feeling their layers pulled back, their organs repositioned, hallucinating from the ketamine as they were hollowed out. And afterwards, when everyone was all babybabybabybaby, and how they tried to be too but couldn’t. It made birth sound supernaturally violent. Sacrificial in the sense of a religious parable. Something that happened before, maybe, but not anymore.

It was the religious parable. A life reduced to a body as a means to an end - the end, which was just another life.

1. The life,

2. the body,

3. the life again.

If this is the pretend you believe in, then it’s not really the soul that’s spiritual - something intangible, belonging to the haze - it’s the flesh. Omnipotent, omnipresent, etc etc. The body as its own thing, you and outside of you; the real in-between.

3.

I used to never want to be one of those mothers who are only about their baby. Those who acted like they never existed before, or if they did, it was only in half-strokes. But listening to these mothers, I see those are probably the lucky ones. In birth a mother is two-headed, four legged. Moving backwards and forwards, in opposite directions. A split-open belly: what’s that as an omen?

Fortunately everyone loves a nothing woman, asleep in the room next door with a headache, broken nailed and nauseous. I think that’s why doctors used to love sending us to the sea so much. I don’t know what’s wrong with you, so I think you should just get very far away to where no one can see you.

It’s not so different now. When I get weird side effects from my medication the specialist says it’s fine. Then I talk to my doctor and she says it’s fine too. I keep staining my tongue orange and being “fine”. I keep going on walks, taking photos of the clouds, texting Jordan while he’s at work and asking what he’s doing. Then my joints ache so bad that I have to get in the bath in the middle of the day and there I fantasise about calling the doctor just to ask if she’s an idiot; an idiot cockroach doctor.

When I was younger I used to love movies about space now I can’t stand the thought of being so small. It gets harder as you age to not be cynical. To not lose faith in the cures, the starvation, the omens and parables. I see it in every medication dose, how I can’t stop from asking, is it done? Is it over? It’s not that big of a deal, but it feels monumental, like when the internet tells me something matters so now I care a lot. And I’m there and not here, low to the ground and quiet, doing nothing, which takes all of me to do.

The sun goes down on my laptop screen, every night the same tinge of orange.

This place is fantastical in Madame Bovary, belonging to ‘the motley crowd of writers… full of idealistic ambitions and wild enthusiasms…liv[ing] in a higher plane, between heaven and earth, among storm-clouds.’

I pretend that this is true. I pretend to see the sunset. I pretend that it is beautiful.

‘As for the rest of the world,’ I pretend with Flaubert, ‘it was nothing, it was nowhere, it scarcely seems to exist.’