Today When I Rattle the Bones

This past week I’ve been checking my watch and thinking: yes, but what time is it “really”? It’s not that I am still on Canary Island time. I don’t think I was ever there, settled into a rhythm of any sort. I’ve been just feverish enough to excuse the complete absence of personal discipline for a while now. The week slid by with the days wobbling: up at 5, up at 9, up at 4.

I was counseling a student last week about setting up fences and frameworks to protect themself. Fence-building is something that I have been sort of good at for a long time now. But these days I feel like my life is being dismantled. Not in a horses-escaping-the-corral kind of way, but rather like the dissolution of my cells’ walls. Every organelle is quivering and vulnerable.

When I was in junior high, I spent my free time with colored pencils and cream paper, drawing cells with their organelles and endoplasmic reticulum…

Researchers believe that lithium performs quantum tunneling through cell barriers, allowing it to depolarize the neuronal membrane. This is a not-so-random fact.

I can’t help but feel that there is a meta-perspective just beyond my scope, from which my whole life makes sense. And something tells me that I am not supposed to have thoughts like these. They might line a slippery slope to conspiracy theories and religious epiphanies.

Or they might form a poem.

Dorothea Lynde Dix wrote during what was likely a period of manic depression (mixed state): “I cannot write – I ought not.” I have always felt like I understood what she meant. These thoughts, diagramed and articulated, conjure the black dogs that will rip your life apart.

I am a scattering of facts- banal facts. Random.

Who has the power to choose, to bother, to make sense of it – to validate your life’s story? You risk annihilation by writing it. You risk petrification – from a single perspective, even your own. This, too, is still death.

We spent our time becoming fiction based on fact. I am not sure that I really want conscious control of that.

There was a film clip that I shared with a colleague, thinking it would benefit our movement students. Two days later something in the video, which I can’t fully conceive, had finally tunneled its way into the sensation of a denatured memory. Now I have to leave the room when it plays.

I am aware that is a lot of words. Over-written. And overly-written.

Last night a scene from an episode of an old television series slowly dug into my mind: innocuous, then inexplicably sinister. My body clenched and I flew out of time – not back in time.

Sensations ripped from narratives but returned to the body.

But if I try to place the whens and whys of the pain, or try to unravel the terror from the fascination – finding a dispassionate perspective to see what must have, likely had been… well, I will never know. Meanwhile, it is there like a tiny edge of yellow wallpaper waving to be tugged free. Whatever this it is.

My shrink has a couch in her office. I assume that someone lies on it now and then. Sitting in the chair, I tuck a knee up to my chest and try to appear casual.