By Alysha Fung Koehler
Winter 2018 Kaplan Award Winner
Phone ringing. Loudly. Obnoxiously. Offensively. I extend an angry arm in the air and, with fingers outstretched, I claw around my pillowy dark grey comforter looking for the rude device. Of course, I’m not actually “looking” for the device since my eyes are closed and still on my head. Hands don’t have eyes. Last I checked anyway. My fingers are following the vibrating hum and at last I have captured it. I shove the abusively white screen up against my face. Don’t have my glasses, am almost legally blind without them. Make out the name of the perpetrator: Mom – heart emoji♥️, hammer emoji🔨, dancing lady emoji💃. There’s a black and white picture of my mother in the background of the still vibrating screen with her arms stretched out wide, black curly hair flailing about, dancing under a crystal disco ball (literally) that hangs in her bathroom. Her nickname at work is the velvet hammer, hence the hammer emoji.
I clear my throat and… reluctantly, answer. I tell her that I’m terribly busy. That no of course I’m not sleeping. I’m on my way to work. Would love to talk but don’t have time right now. Repeat – am ‘terribly busy.’ Will call her later. Have to run. End call.
I roll back over. And with perhaps the greatest effort I have exerted in days, I slowly pull the sheets over my head. Sheets that must weigh a hundred pounds. I don’t know what time it is. 9? Maybe 10? I have lost track of the time, lost track of the day. Everything is irritating. The light coming from my computer charger… the tiny orange light that’s about the size of a pinhole, this light is annoying me. The sound of the walls is bothering me. The way walls make noise, when they creak unpredictably or seem to echo a distant sound from the opposite end of the building. I didn’t ask the wall to make noise, and yet, there it is.
I am not hungry because I feel indifferent about food. But I am thirsty. I guess while most other parts of my normal human being-ness have stopped functioning, my need for water to survive is still present. But I’m too tired to retrieve water from the kitchen. My brain fog is light enough to be able to calculate the kitchen sink is about twelve ambitious steps from the end of my bed. Which I’m still buried in, by the way. It might be noon now. I’m staring up, wondering if maybe a God of some kind somewhere might just drop the ceiling on me giving me no other option but to wake up or end things right here. I wonder what this God might look like and what she must think of me, in this very moment. I laugh out loud at the image of myself. Am I not supposed to do that? Laugh at myself in this state of being-ness, that is.
This state of being-ness has lasted, I don’t know, a few weeks. It cycles in and out. They (my shrinks) have a name for “it”. People (“experts”) have biological, chemical, and genetic explanations for why “it” persists. I don’t really care.
My inconsiderate phone lights up again. A text message. This time, from a “friend.” Asking what I am “up to tonight.” Is it Friday? I think about all of the things I might be “up to.” Babysitting my nephews. On a date. Seeing a movie with someone this “friend” doesn’t really like. Going to a concert I was invited to and… sorry, no extra tickets. Heading out of town for the weekend for a ski trip. I elect not to respond. Perhaps in the morning, whenever that comes, I’ll let her know I was somewhere with no cell service. If such a place exists anymore.
What’s more exhausting than the “condition” I supposedly have, is the boundless amount of energy I put into maintaining a façade that indeed, I’m fine. I’m not just fine actually, I’m excellent. The façade is important, of course, because the ugly moments in which I have allowed myself to be seen beyond the façade are not generally well received. If people could choose, they generally would pick laughing over crying. They would pick smiling over frowning, pleasure over pain, and lightness over heaviness. They would pick watching a funny YouTube video of puppies fighting vacuum cleaners over reading this onerous piece of writing. They would pick the fake façade version of me over the authentic pained version of me. The latter is just too uncomfortable to be present with..
Determined to exit the day with a victory, I sit upright, orienting myself to how the rest of the human-world exists during waking hours. Look across the bedroom and see my shoes all in a neat line in the bottom of my closet. One of the shoes is missing. Not a pair of shoes. Just one shoe of a pair of shoes… it is not where it should be, in the line. This atrocity almost sends me right back in bed. But instead, I laugh at myself again. The illogical stupid nature of all of this, that is.
Sheets aren’t actually heavy. It’s not actually that much “work” to walk twelve steps to retrieve water. One shoe missing is not grounds for retreating back to sleep. A light the size of a pinhole is not worth being annoyed over. Walls don’t make noise loud enough even to disturb a delicate baby. Food is still something I need to exist and function and poop and overall survive as a human being, it should be consumed even if I’m not hungry. It is generally not a good use of my time, intellect, energy, or talent to lay in bed all day lying about how busy and exciting my life is on a Friday night.
I am fully awake and aware of how irrational everything I am thinking and doing is. And yet. I seem to have little control over it. So instead of wallowing in my helplessness, sometimes I laugh at myself. Though I’ve been told that such things aren’t funny. That it is unkind to laugh at someone’s pain. But nobody can sensor laughter from me, about me. It is perhaps my only weapon in this exhausting battle.
After sitting upright for two minutes, maybe two hours, I will myself to put on clothes that are not stained with drool and resemble an almost functioning adult. I can barely pee because I haven’t been drinking water, so I drag my feet on the long journey to the kitchen where at last my thirst is quenched. I decide that my victory for the day will be grocery shopping. Me grocery shopping today is approximately the equivalent of a “normal” human who is not enduring my current condition sprinting up and down Seattle’s Queen Anne hill at a rapid pace with a large backpack carrying two small children, thirty times.
Ear buds help. In goes Stevie Wonder. Sun glasses so nobody can see the sullen expression on my face. I will sneeze every booger I have on the first person who tells me to smile. I embark on the eight-block journey to the nearest grocery store. Nobody bothers me, except everyone. My brain is shouting at them (why are you walking on the wrong side of the sidewalk, why the hell would you ride a bike without your helmet, don’t look at me, stop looking at me, why is everyone smiling?), but my lips remain sealed. I enter the grocery store with the goal of exiting as quickly as humanly possible. A grapefruit, carrots, and a stack of tortillas find their way into my basket. I am not sure what I will make with these ingredients. But I stand in line to purchase them. The grocery clerk is a cheerful young man. He has a lip ring and fruffled reddish hair. He us humming while ringing up the patrons in front of me who purchased way too much string cheese. I resist the urge to sigh excessively, roll my eyes, or tap my foot. Instead remain composed. Am standing tall, proud, shoulders back like grandma always said.
“How’re you today!?” he practically yells into my face.
“Great, thanks,” I smile.