A Little a Lot

Read about time, and you read about ripples. I had that seizure a month ago. Every day since has been touchy. I'm sensitive of any change in the wind. I drink too much caffeine. I exercise to exhaustion. My head pinches with allergies. I stay up late writing. I stand up too fast. I sneeze. The ripples are in the state changes. My control slips for a second, and I'm reminded of when it fell away completely. How it will again. This fear will last another few months. I know from the times before.

I don't want to have another seizure.

Or the truth: I don't want Josh to see me have another seizure.

Josh is good about it, though. You know Josh. He's good. We're good. We have a lot.

We have books. I'm reading Dante's INFERNO now. I've never read it before. There's a circle of Hell where sinners are flattened into mud by an eternal, stinking rain. I'm learning there's no better guide through the horror than a poet. I wonder who could write this book today.

The book I'm writing is almost finished, I swear! It's called THE THREE WOES, and it's short, but what else is new?

My shorts are new. They're so short people have smirked. No people I know. Strangers. I do it for you, strangers.

A stranger once got Josh's last name wrong on the phone. They pronounced it "Mortuary." Joshua Mortuary. Someone write that book.

Good friends were in town last week on their way from New York to New Mexico. They're artists but also people. They provide me with new and interesting rocks and preserved animals. There's a bat on a wall by the front door, and a crab on a shelf, and a stack of black widow spiders in a vial by some books. A rattlesnake's rattle. A pheasant's claw. Fossils. Gems and minerals. Drawings done more than a decade ago. And then there's the button on my winter coat that smells rotten in the rain because my friends' dog chewed on it once. All gifts. All things I've started to draw.

I'm drawing again. A little. Some. My control can't slip there, or the drawing is ruined. I have a theory I can't shake. I think when I have a seizure my brain resets. But it doesn't. I can still draw. I can still write. I still have what I had. Nothing disappears. Only fear is added. And so what?

Fuck fear.

When I Say Ghost

"As far as I know." 

That's the best I can do. I've had six seizures in my life.

As far as I know. 

An exact count is impossible, I've been told, because seizures often occur during sleep. My first seizure was hard to diagnose for that reason. My family couldn't wake me up the morning after Christmas when I was 10. There are other reasons a person might not wake up. To determine epilepsy, multiple seizures must occur. 

My neurologist labeled that first seizure a night terror. Or try it this way: the nightmare that won't let go.

My parents were insistent on epilepsy.

There were tests. I became familiar with electrodes. Sleep was deprived so that seizure activity could be induced. I was a patient child. I slept in machines.

My parents were right.

Epilepsy. 

No one called it a ghost. But like a ghost, the seizure was there, then gone.

I can't shake this haunting even 20 years on.

*

Storms arise. The clouds change from blue to yellow. I, too, get hints before disaster. 

The medical term for the preface to a seizure is "aura." I experience an aura. The word is accurate in the way it conjures a dream. Or the other one. A night terror.

My brain remains active during the aura. I observe and respond. I watch my own arms rise up, independent of my command. I attempt speech, but my words don't have skeletons. They become jellies drooling from my mouth. I chew on my tongue. I forget to breathe. My eyes plead.

After that, I don't remember.

Yesterday, my partner, Josh, witnessed my sixth seizure. He'd never seen me have a seizure before.

"It was your eyes," he said. "I knew you could see me, but you couldn't ask for help." 

When the aura hits, the likelihood of turning back is slim. But it's there. Some people don't receive a warning. If luck enters at all, it enters here. I'm given time. If I know I'm about to have a seizure, I can fight it. That's what my eyes were saying to Josh. 

"Make me fight it."

*

The triggers are numerous. Repetitive lights and sounds. Stress. Lack of sleep. Increase in body temperature. Rapid release of endorphins. It's impossible to isolate a single reason because the underlying cause is deeper. The blame lies elsewhere. I have epilepsy. That blame extends back into my family history until "blame" ceases to have any real meaning. No one intended I have seizures. These genes were handed to me in the dark, and if it were possible, that's where I'd keep them.

Except yesterday was a sunny day in April. I'd just run a 5K. My body told me to take a nap. Instead, I looked back and forth between two computer screens. One of the computers wasn't working how I wanted it to work. I rebooted the system again and again. That only struck me as extreme when the computer began to ask my permission.

"Are you sure this is what you want to do?"

Of course, I thought to myself.

And then, doubt. 

As far as I know.

Enter the unexpected spotlight. The aura.

I ran to the bathroom. My body was the battleground, and if I could watch myself in the mirror, I could lead the charge. The impulse was ridiculous. I didn't make it to see my reflection.

As relayed to me later by Josh, I yelled out nonsense and hit the floor. There was dust on my face and blood in my nose. A tendril from the plant in the windowsill curled around my chin. Josh moved the plant. He said he could tell it was bothering me. By that point, there was no me to bother. The "me" had gone black. My frontal lobe, the place where my personality is generated, was hit by too much electricity. I became a simple machine running numbers.

Boot. Reboot.

Are you sure?

As far as I know. 

I was gone. Josh inherited my emergency. He took out his phone and called 911.

*

When I first come out of a seizure, I'm not really awake. I function, but that's not the same.

The paramedics arrived five minutes after Josh made the call. They took my blood pressure and asked me questions. My name. My birthday. If I'd like to go to the hospital for further medical treatment. I knew my name, and I knew my birthday, and I knew I didn't want to go to the hospital. I signed a touch screen. My signature was bad. I scratched it out. 

"Sir, would you like to try again?"

I tried again, this time in a child's cursive. Every letter was clear. 

Josh says. 

I don't remember any of it. 

After the paramedics left, Josh walked me to bed. He said my jeans felt wet. He offered to wash them for me. I emptied the pockets. Another act I don't remember.

I remember going to sleep. I remember waking up three times to vomit. I remember thinking, "Not again." Four years had passed since the last one. The story I'd told myself began and ended with, "You're mended." I held tight to that lie. Every seizure was the last seizure if I was strong enough.

I see the danger in that type of thinking, and yet I can't stop.

At midnight, Josh woke me up to eat. I'd slept all evening. I ate dry cereal and worried over the cost of the ambulance. I never would have called 911. I didn't see what Josh saw, though. Maybe I felt the seizure arrive, but Josh watched it travel through me, and then he watched it go. 

*

During college, I was medicated. The medication offered uniformity. I took one pill in the morning and one at night. I was free of seizures. I became romantic about my disability. 

Around this time, SMITH Magazine started their six-word memoir project. My posted memoir from 2009 reads, "My seizure disorder is still poetic." 

Again, the need to control the narrative. I had the pill, so I had the weapon. 

More fighting.

Weapons aren't always precise. Seizures are wild. The pill was a blanket that covered more than my epilepsy. I became soft. I became timid. I became tired.

I forgot to take my pill one morning. The seizure arrived that afternoon. Here was the deal I didn't know I'd made: On my own, I could go years between seizures. On the medicine, I could miss one dose, and I'd have a seizure the same day.

I didn't like the bargain, so I quit. I weaned myself off the pill. 

All those years, I'd been safe looking out a dirty window. Now the window was open, and the danger was real. 

Lightning strikes.  

*

There are tricks. 

If I feel an aura coming, I can close one of my eyes and discourage the seizure. Something about the flow of visual information to the brain. The point is I'm my own medicine now, and I'm not always fast enough. I try to balance my existence as both the problem and the solution.

Josh is afraid. Today, he asks how I am. He hugs me a lot to make sure I'm the "me" he knows and not the other me, the ghost he only met once.

I ask him what it was like. How I looked. How I sounded.

He won't say. 

I feel the remnants. My legs and arms are sore. My tongue is numb. My jaw aches from clenching. There are bruises on my chin and left elbow. 

I fought myself again and didn't lose.

When I say ghost, this is what I mean.

L.A.

For a place with so much history, Los Angeles appears to have been built yesterday. I wasn't in a city so much as a spilled box of Lego bricks. The links were sloppy, but a connection is a connection. I walked four miles to lunch. The sun turned my neck and nose pink. I never felt the burn. In a similar way, I stared out at the ocean, and for the first time in my life, I didn't feel the water beckon me. I felt it push me away.

Everyone out there has a solid reason to be out there. Otherwise, they'd be somewhere else. My reason was my friend, xTx. She read Thursday night. Two of my other friends came along. None of the three had ever met each other. We stood in a timeline. Abbi was high school. Chelsea, college. xTx, now. And of course that's too simple. Let me explain.

I met Abbi on a choir trip. We shared a moment of recognition. Friends forever. Friday night, I dreamed we were on a bus looking out opposite windows. I saw a haunted high school and began to tell Abbi the story of its most tragic ghost. Abbi didn't turn to acknowledge the school. She said she knew the story, and she was looking at the very place where it all happened. I turned and looked out her window. There was another haunted high school across the street from my haunted high school. What are the odds? We are the odds. A teacher once told us friends made in high school don't last. As if to spite him, we happily endure.

In college, Chelsea and I drove south to the place where three states meet and legend has it the Devil takes moonlit walks on an old bridge. Each night a spectral orb floats over the road. We witnessed the orb and were fascinated. That wasn't so long ago, but it gets longer ago every day. I miss Chelsea. She's good weather. She never stays anywhere long.

xTx. The hours we're together are the best hours. Thursday night we locked arms and joined hands and hugged like we were dying. I was sent to surprise her. She was surprised. I held her drink while she clapped for other readers. She whispered something in my ear, and I laughed at the same time someone told a joke that wasn't funny.

Stars aligned. Mars appeared brighter than usual. Fog rolled in, and the pastries were incomparable. On the way home, my flight dug through a thunderstorm. I was in the clouds with lightning, and I was aware I wasn't electric. 

These people jolt me.

Re: A Letter to a Friend

Her name's xTx, but no, it's not.

We met on the Internet first. We met in person when I saw her hair across a bar in Chicago and knew it was her. Her hair is the only part she allows in photographs. She says if I saw her in a grocery store it wouldn't even cross my mind we should be friends. The truth is I look for her everywhere now, and sometimes I think I see her for a second in other people. I've told her about every pie I've made, even the ones that didn't work. There was the one with corn and another with cantaloupe. 

She lives in L.A., and I live in Kansas City. We talk on the phone maybe twice a year. The times we hug are in cities neither of us call home. When I tell people about her, I don't say she's my friend from L.A.; I say she's my friend from the Internet.

She wrote me a letter on Saturday. I respond:

Dear _____,

Today is Thursday. You'll see Roxane. I'll see the weather change. Earlier, it was raining and thundering. Now, the sun is out and the wind is slamming screen doors. Later, tornadoes possible.

Upstairs, a dog barks, and a woman barks back at the dog.

Last night was the first meeting of our book club with our friends and neighbors. We read JENNY AND THE JAWS OF LIFE by Jincy Willett. Everyone liked the book, with one guy going so far as to say he didn't dislike any of it. The meeting was held at our house. I took great pains to make a good impression. The bathroom was scrubbed clean, but no one used it.

I'm glad your mother got to visit. My mother hasn't been out here in several years. The last in-person conversation we had regarded our burial preferences. "Cremation," she said. I nodded. "Me too." She sent me some yarn in the mail a couple weeks ago. I'm going to make her a scarf. Maybe two. The season for scarves is ending, but then again, maybe not. We got snow in May last year.

The tour of our place ends with us showing guests the spare bedroom and saying, "Shhh. A snake is listening." I bought her when Josh was at work one day. She was small and jeweled as a candy bracelet. Mostly pink then. Now, mostly white. I've seen her tie herself into knots.

You worry too much. Take your guilt and shove it!

Good luck at your reading. I want to be there.

Carry on,

Casey

Wow

If I saw you in Seattle, I saw you in Seattle. We hugged and you heard my stomach boil. I didn't stop eating up there. The power to climb all those hills came from meals on top of meals. No crumbs were wasted entertaining sea gulls. Please don't feed those birds anything. They're already the size of helicopters. One of them got close to my face on a pier railing, and I offered it my wallet. Empty calories!

I read some stories to people in a lounge. A pipe above me dripped on my jeans. It even rains indoors in Seattle. The wet weather got into my coat and made the button a dog chewed on last year start stinking again.

I wore my new scarf. I appeared to be wearing a neck brace. People weren't having it. They didn't say anything, but the looks! At least on the test run in Kansas City, someone on the street was helpful and said, "Are you fucking kidding me?!"

You must remember, though, that in college I knit a Superman sweater complete with cape and wore the thing out shopping. I was hopeful on the size. My roommate used to call it "chub-n-tight" when men wore a size too small. We were amorous of such men. I tried to be one myself. I see pictures now, and I don't know who I'm looking at. In the middle of that phase, Josh found me.

Two weeks ago, we took a ferry to an island near Seattle to watch rich people in their nature preserve of mansions and beaches. On one of the beaches there was a sign warning about toxic mollusks. There were illustrations of the shells to beware. I saw a million crab claws sticking out of the sand. The only whole crabs I saw where on ice in the market. I made Josh consider the water out the market windows. He said, "I wish we had windows like this at home." Water is water everywhere, I guess. Call me easy to please, but I couldn't get enough of that dark blue water. All I could say was, "Wow."

Another surprise. I've discovered the truth about my upstairs neighbors and all the noise they make. Turns out the second floor is a forest. The trees harbor wolves. When the boyfriend leaves for work every morning, the girlfriend goes about her own work cutting down each tree and burning the wood to draw out the wolves. Next comes the fighting and the canine crying. The scratching. The screaming. Folk music masks the murder. The girlfriend kills all the wolves. The boyfriend arrives home and is pleased. He and the girlfriend celebrate all night by linking arms and legs. They chew on bones and laugh. I look out the window to see if anyone has fallen on the ice. Nothing. The forest regenerates in the night.

Down here, I write. My myth about it shrinks. It's not a conversation if I know I'm talking to myself, so I pretend I'm talking to you.

Men with Broken Banjos

This February I'm not empty, but I might be an aquarium with just water left in it. A painter friend had a show last week. She said she occupies the same hollow. She's alone all day, too, painting tiny jeweled bricks and hair nests and feathers. All her conversation is used up talking to herself.

A different friend was over, and I opened my mouth. I wasn't sure what I was going to say. I thought I must say something. Now I don't remember if I said anything. During the day I listen to music but don't sing along. I whistle. A whistle isn't words. Where are my words. That's not a question. I'll find them. I'm finding them. I found some of them today.

The music I listen to could best be described as "men with broken banjos." The men have gaps in their front teeth. The men are slim as blades of grass. The wind whistles sharp against the flatness of these men. Sometimes the men are women. The heads of their banjos are busted, and the faces of cats peer out. Don't ask me for names.

I know I'm almost finished writing what I'm writing. (A small book.) Short as it is, it took long enough. I'll hand it over when I'm certain. I keyboard the limp parts. They harden.

I thought I saw a ghost today. I've seen ghosts, and I've pretended to see ghosts. Today I didn't see a ghost. I thought I did. A thunderstorm stretched black outside. I wore the mood like a thin condom. Someone slammed a car door, and I convinced myself I felt the slam in my balls. I hung up the laundry. From the corner of my eye something quick and white and large enough to touch the floor and the ceiling all at once stepped out the closest window. A passing vehicle reflection, maybe. My glasses are cheap and susceptible to glare. I remove them when posing for photographs. The (no) ghost stirred my nerves. Good for that ghost. I knitted some rows on a scarf. I wrote and rewrote and unwrote. To unknit a piece of knitting is called "frogging." Like the yarn after frogging, the words I had on hand were kinked. The texture from their reuse was good to read.

Great. Wow. The luxury of this kind of work. No one depends on it, and yet I know some people who might tell me otherwise, so I continue. One of them asked me for a story. That story is at Squalorly. What a good name. You could give a baby that name, but only when it's crying.

The Sugar People

Josh's sister turned 30. It happens. In a little over a year, it will happen to me. For Josh's sister, it had to happen in New Orleans. She wanted us all down there with her, so we all went down there with her. We stayed in a purple house. The ceilings were unreachable. The French Quarter was a mile away. Josh and I walked everywhere we could walk.

Each morning we went out for a juice breakfast with Josh's sister. The first morning we hiked to a place called The Green Fork. Actress Jennifer Coolidge stood in line behind us. We waited for our juice. Jennifer Coolidge sampled a muffin. Josh suggested she try the vegan blondie. Jennifer Coolidge tried the vegan blondie. "Oh my God," she said.

The walk back to the French Quarter had us passing a day-drunk man preparing to pee on the courthouse. He told us not to worry because he was wearing triple-thick pants. Two stone eagles flanked the man. We were witness to a freedom we'd all exercised before but never with a daylight audience. We kept walking.

But we didn't walk everywhere. Some group trips we took a taxi. One of our drivers was a doctor. He gave us his business card. He signed the A in his name with a cartoon penis. A woman in our group asked the doctor for details on his doctorate. The doctor had never been asked specifics. "Communications," he said. "Well, journalism, really." We all agreed there was no money in that. As if we had to vocalize it. The doctor drove us to the nicest restaurant in town.

Another driver asked if we'd heard of the Sugar People. Silence. "Sure you have," he said. "You've heard of gay people. They're the Sugar People." It's true that once every year in New Orleans there's a festival for the Sugar People, and they come dressed to kill. The same driver warned us of swamp dangers. He made sure we were clear on alligators. Like how an alligator drags its prey to the river bottom and waits for the flesh to soften enough for consumption. Death is all over that town. I saw bones on the sidewalk. The cemeteries are above ground. Even the donuts, the beignets, are little pillows on which heart attacks slumber. Yes, it felt like home.

A friend asked if I might want to move to New Orleans one day, and I said I felt like I'd already lived there before. There are places that fit you. Kansas City fits me. Kansas City fits other writers, too. My friend and poet crush, Jordan Stempleman, was asked to guest-edit an issue of NOÖ Weekly by Mike Young. Jordan chose writers with a stake in Kansas City. I'm one, and then there's Anne Boyer, Dan Magers, Ryan MacDonald, Lesley Ann Wheeler, Bridget Lowe, Teal Wilson, and James Tate. That James Tate. My story is dark and cold. It's in a fitting place. We all suffer January.