I. Step forward.


Wake up at three in the afternoon, the headache you tried to nap off still clinging there. Day four of this particular headache. Close your left eye, because it hurts more on that side, and on days like this you can almost feel it trying to push your eye out of your head.
You feel like a bug, big round eye sticking out.
Turn on the facet in the kitchen, put your mouth under it to suck in lukewarm, metal tasting city water. Move the two horse-sized painkillers from your palm to your tongue. Swallow. Suck in more water, trying to keep your hair out of the dirty dishes. Swallow. Repeat.
This is part of being sick - I tell those close to me, those who need to know, that I’m sick. That there is something in my head. I was feeling poetic and angry at the café the night I decided to tell my artist friend. There’s a bullet in my head, I told him.
Crawl to the living room, collapse on the couch, close your eyes and try to imagine the headache as a separate entity. One you can close off if you concentrate on wrapping your thoughts around it just right.
This isn’t a good day, but it’s not one of the bad ones.
The bad days are vertigo, swirl spinning, laying down wherever you are and swimming in nausea. The bad days are when you can’t move your head a nanometer because you can’t tell which direction is up and your body compensates by threatening to vomit anytime you move.
I rarely do vomit, though I know it would make me feel better. I’m afraid of the trip stumbling down the hallway only knowing which way is up because walls are usually built at 90 degree angles. And once I tried to make myself puke right there on the carpet, but I didn’t have the nerve to turn my head. Didn’t want the swirling, floating, lost feeling. My head didn’t want it.
And the really bad days.
Laying, feeling gravity pull on your limbs, and it’s so awkward. The feeling of gravity pulling down hard on you is awkward because you didn’t think that was down. It’s like you were walking down the street and suddenly you had to grab a lamp post or you’d fall into the sky.
I’d rather have no sense of direction than the wrong one. Or have it change. The really bad days are the pain and the nausea and all you can do is think about it. It can’t be a separate entity these days, it consumes every nerve in your body to make you feel pain deeper than you thought imaginable. It has to borrow pain from other places to give you this and all you can do is pray. Pray in half-formed syllables, mumbling if you dare, or just silent. Pray that God’s a mind-reader.
The really bad days are the only days you ask why. Why me. Why now. Why this. On all the other days you know why. The answer is a question: Why anyone else?

I started smoking because it was a way of cheating death.
No. Smoking was like dying for me. Smoking was like teasing death. The first cigarette of the day, you inhale and feel it coat your lungs. Smoke it fast, and it asphyxiates you. Your head gets light, your limbs get heavy. The first cigarette always lays me out. Like vertigo, only I know which direction is up and I can feel which direction is up. Not that I want to stand up at all. The first cigarette I didn’t enjoy was the first one of the day on a Monday around 3:30 in the afternoon. I woke up with a headache. Drug my body down the hall. Stopped by the bathroom to get the horse pills. Stuck my head under the facet in the kitchen.

My porch is my quiet center of the world. And today, at 4 in the afternoon, the high school kids driving their booming cars and the elementary school children screaming at each other, it’s too much and I have to go inside. It’s cold in here, the air conditioner always on.
Somewhere, a kid is bouncing a basketball. Bounce, bounce, bounce… Bounce, bounce, bounce. Rhythms. Patterns of threes. My heartbeat starts coming in threes, and then it’s too much. I have to go into the ice cave living room, the hunter green furniture I have because my uncle didn’t think it was chic enough anymore. And Mom called. She says she’s got Uncle Rick’s big black penis extension truck full of cow manure for the front lawn.
How’s that cow manure for you, Uncle Rick? Chic enough?
He’ll buy a new car within days. Maybe I’ll get to drive the big black penis extension.

The burning filters in the Campbell’s Chicken Soup can. The label still on. Josh hates the smell of burning filters.
I once started a mini-fire. A sort of burning pyre to smokers everywhere and all of the slow painful ways to kill ourselves out there. Josh cursed at me, and rushed it away – the ashtray full of smoldering filters, my salute to little deaths: smoking, orgasms, illicit drug addictions, alcoholism, gluttonous wastage of fossil fuels.
The French call it la petite mort.


I’m 18. I’m a woman, most of the time. Sometimes I’m a man. My little sister’s name is Audrey. I love my father, and my mother who had an operation to loose her extra weight and now she looks just like her mother. My name, my father’s name, and my roommate’s are on the lease for a two bedroom on the right side of the train tracks.
I moved in here because they have a beautiful pool with a fountain and everything is pink. Pink stucco pink, southwestern style, false adobe, concrete steps that rattle the whole building when you trudge up or down at night.
I drive a gray Toyota pickup. ’92. Paint peeling. Dents everywhere. Just got out of the shop. Had the starter, alternator, wiring, battery replaced. Had the seats shampooed for the first time since I’ve owned it. It got rid of the round imprint where the seat of my jeans goes – just the right spot so I can sit slightly askew, tap my cigarette out the window, use my left leg for the clutch, or steering the wheel when I’m lighting up or doing my hair.
This is my life – wearing an engagement ring I bought off of e-bay for 35 dollars because no one else bid on it. It’s beautiful. Three diamonds, past present future. The silver band is thick, wavy. It’s my lifeline, a tad too small, declaring my commitengagement to myself.
This is my life – and the boy I date who wants to be a writer and has finally started writing and waking up next to him is bliss and even when we fight I can just crawl into his bed at 3:30 in the morning (the backdoor is never locked) and he’ll moan and roll over and clutch me.
This is my life. And I want to bring you into it. Come, enter the concrete balcony, the ice cave, the southwestern stucco, the dysfunctional functional family, the stomach stapling operations, the cab I can reach both sides of from the driver’s seat, the cool glint of the diamonds on the self bought self given engagement ring.
Come. And I’ll show you something. I’ll show you one tiny life – not even a blip on the evolutionary scheme of things, but a moment nonetheless. Come. Close your eyes a moment and imagine yourself here. Close your eyes and see the life of someone else. Close your eyes and see me. I’m here. I am right here. And I want to show you something.
Come.
Close your eyes a moment.
Step into the small dot of light, the reflection off of the band, then off of the stone itself. Let the light fill your vision. Let it come white hot into your brain. Let it consume you.
Step forward.
Let the light fill you up. Let it be everywhere and nowhere. Let yourself be a thousand miles away.
Close your eyes.
See the white hot light. See it fill you.
Step forward.
Drink the light in. And now everything is white.
Step forward.


II. A Dream.



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