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.