the inside becomes the outside

Today it rains. I am somewhat happy about this. The weather in Santa Barbara can be placid and monotonous. Or else the variations in weather are limited to rearrangements in the cloud cover/fog/marine layer. So rain. It's a thing. An event. It makes noise. Last night we both woke up when we heard something go crash in the house; this morning, I can't discern what could have fallen. Everything appears to be in its normal place. Rain also means the ants come trooping in. I've tried to herd them back outside, traced over their moving black lines with chalk, but they return. They are so numerous. Their stream flows in two directions. I'm not sure which way is in and which is out. I've been thinking of the simultaneity of surfaces -- like klein bottles and mobius strips.

Sometimes it is like I've been asleep for ten months and I'm just waking up. I've tapered down my medicine, and now I'm only taking half of a vicodin here and there. I'm still taking muscle relaxers at night and ibuprofen every six hours, so tapering down those will be the next frontier. I took a percocet on Friday, and consequently spent the rest of the weekend trying to clear the fog. I can't believe that I was taking SIX of those each day. One made me feel like a mummy -- as though my insides had been dehydrated and my outsides were wrapped in cloth.

Physical therapy is opening some new pains. I feel like I've been clinging to the edge of a cliff. I can't let go. But now I'm asking my body to let go, and it is taking a lot of work. I can think "relax relax relax," and yet the muscles remain as hard as rocks, the joints are stiff -- it's like tugging on a stuck door. The physical therapist said my strength was a 20% -- that I had the strength of an 80 year old woman. Before the injury I always imagined myself as strong, powerful. Now I must ask for help all the time. I feel self conscious because I think I must still look strong. I worry people will think "why does she need help." I probably need to let go of this too.

post post-op

a thing happens like turning down the corner of the page, and the next page is there. a turning down that feels a bit like a seeing through. a counting down of pills. dreams of apple trees growing inside silver, financial cones. a sort of institutionalized kindness that is just good enough. just seeing through. how the disembodied becomes you again. yes, this is my head, my hair. I'm seeing through. I try to wear jeans, but the incision seam is still there, up my back like a zipper, the plastic stitches underneath my skin. For weeks, it bubbled. "an allergic reaction." this is what my surgeon said. my surgeon? I want to ask him what he saw when he looked inside me. I want to say "describe it." I feel shy asking questions, ask my husband to take notes. In the car, I ask him over and over, "what else did he say?" and "how did I seem?" How do I seem? Am I here? The bottles collect like...a snowdrift of bottles -- everything in the orange RX. but recovery is the new category.

I survived!

the body is a ghost

or host to ghosts -- cells &
helicopter text ticky-type
and symptom syntax of every
physical memory crushed
into tell-all fibers
and clues -- fibbers &
the glue-clock pushing
through. The inside marks
where bone tics two by two
legs arms hands and mirrors
say two heads too. False
eyelashes and blue mascara
the blue-green veins pulled
through, suffused with pills:
powder dolls. Our little body
house too full -- there's
nothing else to do save
cutting through and then
stitch stitch new & ta-da!
it isn't them -- it's you --
the ghost you never
knew you knew.

My difficulty is that

______limbs_____dont't fit

__________together

cling__________what's left

___entrapment__swell

and shatter_______sparkle

drone

______in scattered cells

articulate clues

__________vertebrae

I choose to arrest

___________my face

behaves_________ in saviors

______mirrors

Fear

The recurring image is that I'm on some sort of conveyor belt heading toward chopping jaws -- serrated, hungry -- and I can't get off.

There is too much information. It is too confusing.

The system is overwhelmed.

There is more bargaining.

There is a fantasy of being disembodied, serene. Another fantasy is of being buoyant, tranquil. There is water and sun and warmth.

Today, we walked on the bluffs that overlook the beach. I was iced, medicated. It is our fifth wedding anniversary. I scan the horizon for breaching whales, diving pelicans, otters floating in the kelp. We hold hands and I am so thankful that I am not alone, although I resent the injury and how it has taken over my body, our lives. Later, down the path, a rabbit darts out of the brush and pauses, one paw raised, and then scampers off. Two girls pull a wagon full of pillows, and atop the pillows is another girl. She is lazily eating from a box of fig newtons They're playing a game, they tell us, and I feel happy for them. The ocean air is sweet and crisp and I imagine leaping off the cliff into the waves. I crave the weightlessness of being in water.

The thing is, I'm terrified of having surgery, and today, as I read through the files I'd requested from the doctor's office, I see that all the arrows point to it. I'm worried that if I decline surgery, I will be punished. I've been told the my condition will be declared "permanent and stationary." I took messy notes in shorthand, but how can I remember in this haze? It's happening too fast.

ANGER

One of the feelings I have frequently is anger. People in pain are often angry. Pain can be invisible, and for a long time, I tried to make sure it remained invisible: suppressing winces, groans, tears. Those things emerged, of course -- one can't hold those things in forever.

There are also the psychological dimensions. I've been told that what I've been doing a lot of is bargaining. I keep coming up with bargains. Maybe if I keep going to work, I won't be injured. Maybe if I don't eat sugar, I won't be injured. Maybe if I do these stretches, I won't be injured. Maybe if I take these pills, I won't be injured. Maybe if I walk to the mailboxes and back, I won't be injured. Maybe if I keep my feelings a secret, I won't be injured.

So I can't be surprised that people don't know. I can't be surprised that people expect me to be operating at full capacity if I don't tell them how much pain I'm in -- if I don't tell them that the drugs make me feel like I'm under water, or in a snow drift, or stippled by pins. I can't count change at the grocery store, or look for a lost shoe, or fold paper evenly, or spell.

I'm angry. I want my life back. I want to be able to move forward with my life plans. I want to be able to write poem, finish a story, visit with friends. I want to be able to sit in a movie theater, drive my car, put on my underwear -- I want to do things without feeling the searing, excruciating pain.

I want people to be nice to me.

Pain has a sort of myopia. I notice things like the textures of clothing: so many things are too itchy and my skin is on fire. The drugs give me dry mouth and everything tastes awful. I'm hyper-attentive to the ice pack, the heating pad, the myriad analgesic jams and jellies that smell sticky-sick and sweet, the dilapidated mountains of pillows upon which I try to arrange my body like a bag a of broken sticks or rusty hinges.

I do not want to feel guilty about building up a tolerance to the drugs.

I do not want to be hysterical.

I hate myself for being so self-absorbed.

together, we make our reality real.

I forget without you. String little

hellos in the baby's gurgle. Slippers

in daylight, all this gray turned

to sparkle. The stillness

in bedclothes: wondering

wakefulness. The bend

in my spine: still here.

It feels like it is taking forever: this healing. It takes a long time. It's an orange color, like oil. Liquid gold. Rusted iron in the twirls, marshland habitat. Red throated birds call out to us. We're taking forever: too long.

I dream of being organized. of being out of pain. of having a gut full of crystals: opiate residue. Like the crystals that consumed the box for the oil gusher in the gulf. crystals in the so deep it's so cold. At what point does one decide -- that's it: cut me. It's been 5 months. Is that too long to wait? Not long enough? There are moments when my mind is available, and I feel like myself, and I look at the date and I can only wonder what I've been doing. What did I do during February? Was I here? Did you see me?

clean scissors, I beg

for rescue, for a pin

to tend the pain: pink

not newly, slit red

then blue. In purple

liquids I store

the pulse: thump

thump in the dark

narcotics. Fizz-

winged, my fissures

shore: approach

the winking beacon

of a still-life body:

smooth and porous, pried

free from every

pinching reign: stung

veins and stony ventricles.

Things You Can Do with a Ghost

Go all the way

up the hill

to the tippy-

top. Hold your

glass hand

still. Pour ink

into all the

corners. Invent

the perfect

circle. Kiss

the friends you used

to know. Hold

your breath inside

the house. Sew

the door with

an answer. See

into the mirror

before you see

yourself. Change

a bone to a bowl

of milk. Leave

a note so the doctor

knows just where

to go, where to open.

Things have been difficult to talk about. Like talking underwater or trying to talk during sleep. These are the metaphors that come to me over and over again. My mind is underwater; it's in a fish tank, water artificially blue and antiseptic. All I want to say, over and over again is I'm sorry. The refrain I cling to when I'm afraid. I'm sorry for being afraid. At night, narcotic waves of salt washing over me, the bed is a giant cradle rock rock rocking on jagged swirls. On the mri, there was a wash of black, blooming out of the vertebrae, like ink releases from a squid. See there -- how your nerve disappears? I nodded, not knowing what I was looking at but feeling it light up neon red and electric. The best cure is distraction -- distractions of love, making ready, celebration. This is what makes the body numb. The combination of champagne and vicodin and I'm saying things like you could cut me and I wouldn't feel it or care. And then there was a needle the length of my forearm (from finger tip to elbow) and the nudging in of the needle, and the x-ray pictures (I've never been so photographed) and then sitting up, the world yellowing and all the sounds swelling up and I've fainted sitting up. It's called vasovagal syncope. It's the oldest nerve in the body, I'm told. It bypasses the cerebral cortex and goes right to your gut. It felt like stepping off the side of a cliff -- yellow and silent-- and I'm in the paper hospital dress reaching my hand out into the air, unable to make a fist.

injury

I experience a little burst of optimistic extroversion about twenty minutes after I take Vicodin. I wish this feeling lasted longer. The chemical nature of the feeling intrigues me. Because it is a feeling... like a mood...not a sensation.

The aspect of my injury that is the most curious to me is not the pain, but the lack of strength...the weakness and the absence of a reflex in my right ankle. Several times a day, I try to stand on my toes. First I try the left leg, and I go up, almost bouncily. Then I try the right, and I wobble wobble wobble fall; I just can't do it. stand stand stand I say, and almost nothing happens. It reminds me a little of that feeling of trying to yell or talk in a dream. Those moments of sleep-space are interesting. Sometimes the desire to speak is so powerful that one wakes up mid-sentence.

I am told that I talk in my sleep often.

Time goes by, hazily. It is a February sort of way. Muffled, with narration.

This also means that I have had to take a break from the birds.

I've been thinking about fur. The next project involves fur, faux and otherwise. I cannot imagine wearing "real fur." When I think of it, I see flashes of Carrie covered in pig's blood. There is a sensitivity to it. It feels painful. "It hurts to look at you."

the pain economy

"On a scale of 1 to 10, rate your level of pain."