The Nurse

 Early on, Daniel swept his thumb over my areola, observing the faint red bumps that surrounded my nipples. “What are these tiny red bumps? They respond to my touch.” I didn’t know, and had never noticed them. We researched it together, and found that they were glands for lubrication for breastfeeding. As if my maternity was predetermined, whether or not my body was actually the vessel I would use to nurture. 

When you’re with somebody who has a mother who can’t be their mother, you become their mother. Daniel needed stability at home, delicious cooking smells, warmth, music, a dog to love — all of the things to come home to that he didn’t have when he was growing up. But, like they do their real parents, they all start to resent you for it. They always need to have their foot out the door, an escape route, just like children do as they become teenagers and see their parents as flawed, aggravating, humiliating beings tethering them to one place, one family, one way of existing.

But I thought the resentment of a real parent would be replaced by gratitude and now, like an aged parent of adult children, I live a solitary life in my silent cabin where the phone rings perfunctorily instead of passionately. 

There’s selfishness in my selflessness, my mothering. The only way to be indispensable, valued, validated, is to be needed by others, to provide a service.My body wants maternity, wants to labor, and my brain knows it’s because of the ultimate hedonism: babies always have something to cry for, to need, their survival is contingent on being held. 

Memories and visions of maternity appear when I’m ovulating each month, recurring dreams of laboring and birthing. I know I’m in the fertile window of my menstrual cycle when I close my eyes and a vision appears from a childhood home video: my parents are testing out a new video camera, and my mom is holding me, eight months old, in her arms. My Mom and Dad kiss and wave for the camera, and then my Mom spins in slow circles with me, dancing with her baby, just the two of us in her world, though my dad and sister are a foot away. She bounces me on her hip as she twirls, and we both giggle with joy, our mother daughter dance in our cocoon that belongs just to us. 

For hours after I’ve held a baby, I find myself swaying back and forth as though I’m still holding them, soothing them, making them feel cherished.

From Across a Room

Daniel hikes out of Big Sur and into town. We’ve found a new, friendly rapport that ultimately proves to be temporary. We take Ladybird for a walk, sit on the beach watching a purple sunset with the supplies I’ve packed — a flask of tequila, a few bottles of beer, lime wedges, cigarettes. He spots an otter coasting by, close to the shore, grooming itself after eating a meal. I remember being on a walk together and seeing a family of deer, but not announcing it so that he could have the thrill of claiming them first. 

Once the sun has gone down we return to the cabin, where I dish out the ginger carrot soup I’d made that morning. Daniel warms the bread — he always waits until it’s perfect, something I get too impatient to do. We inhabit our natural rhythm for a moment without a conscious thought. It’s the first time I don’t want it. I suddenly can’t wait for him to leave, wanting him out of my field of vision, out of what I now acknowledge is my home, not our home, though our shared belongings from our life together still fill it. Instead of feeling relieved that I’m ready for him to leave, I feel guilty. I could never have imagined wanting to exclude him from anything after so many years of protecting him. I don’t want him to be left out.

I’ve never felt compelled to make a home for myself. I was compelled to make a home because I wanted to give it to Daniel. Now, I leave his towel on the rack closest to the shower, and I take the second towel rack, far across the bathroom. I leave up the two photos of him as a young child, looking mischievous and sad, that he hung on the walls before he left. I continue to buy his favorite foods at the grocery store. It takes me months to realize that I can come first. I can take the closest towel rack, and spare myself the frigid, wet, naked walk to the hook on the back of the bathroom door for mine. I can take down the photos from his childhood. I can stop buying his foods and make what I like instead. But I don’t know what to hang in the empty spots on the walls. I don’t know what to cook for myself. I don’t know what I like anymore, or what I don’t like, or what I am like. I realize I never knew these things — I just knew them in relation to him, to his preferences, to his personality, his experiences. After more than three decades on the planet, I still don’t know what to put on my wall that I would like to look at every day. I spend hours roaming the aisles at the grocery store. I try to go to antique malls and thrift stores to find art for the walls. I can only imagine Daniel eating each item I put in the cart, can only see his responses to each frame I flip through. I consider that I need to be deprogrammed from him, from our lives together, from deferring to and concentrating on him, his comfort, his vitality. I admit to myself that I have no idea how to do that. That his influence, approval, and comfort have driven everything I’ve done for 12 years, and now I don’t know where to start. I don’t have a starting point for my own life, I simply have references to someone else’s. But hadn’t I built it for him? So wasn’t that me, too, and what I like and how I am? Didn’t I create this for us? None of it feels like mine anymore. I don’t know where to start. I haven’t looked another man in the eyes for 12 years without an opaque filter that we both can see, each staying on our respective side. 

“I can still feel your happiness or sadness from across a room.” Daniel writes to me, during our temporary effort to become friends. “I do miss your friendship. I miss sharing my life with you. And maybe I don’t know you, really, anymore. I don’t know if it will hurt, or if we won’t have anything to say to each other anymore.”

As I read this, I crouch next to the kitchen cupboard, my body heaving with sobs. This is where I come to cry. In a cabin of mostly windowed walls, this is the best place for privacy. If a neighbor drops by, I can sit here and they won’t see me. The cupboard has been repainted so many times, it’s thick with layers of pale pink. I fondle the edges of the cupboard. My favorite spot to touch is the drip of pink paint on the white handle. I can also feel Daniel’s happiness or sadness from across a room, and it had never occurred to me that might cease to happen.

Room 33

As I put up with the atrocities of being alive each day, my scant self—buoyancy slowly empties out. By 4pm, my vision is forcibly overtaken by the image of the dead bird I tried to save on my Welcome! mat a few months ago. I made a bed for it, a hand towel in a shoebox, with the smelling salt of a Q-Tip dipped in brandy on its pillow. As soon as I picked up the bird, I realized its body was hollow and its eyes were missing. The outside of its body, every single feather, appeared intact. I feel like that empty dead bird after too many waking hours.

It took Leo fucking my organs back into me for me to open my eyes again. Pupils and irises inside my lids instead of shocked black holes.

Until I see him again, I can’t take a deep breath and my ribs feel like they’re going to break when I try. The more I can’t get depth on a breath, the more I panic and need it. I try to ignore the pain, too tired and irritated to have another part of my body betraying me. This happens for weeks until I can no longer function through it. 

By the time I reach the top of the hill, Ladybird is looking at me strangely because of the altered sounds of my breathing that neither of us has heard before. I finally submit and drive myself to the hospital. My body is engulfed in heat, my cheeks are electric red, my temperature and blood pressure are high. A nurse straps a face mask on me in case I’m contagious. I follow her to Room 33. The moment I’ve changed into the hospital gown, a crew of three women charge into the room, peel back the top of the gown without warning, and place stickers all over my chest to run an EKG. When I instinctively move to cover my breasts, one of them comments “You uncomfortable with your shirt off? It’s just us girls!” and I think of being naked at the pool with Daniel at the commune, unwillingly bare. An IV is ordered to inject the dye for a CAT scan, and when the nurse can’t find a vein, she pokes so many times I faint. When I regain consciousness, one nurse is holding my legs up to get the blood back to my brain, while the other one is still poking at my arm, trying.

“The dye makes you feel like you’ve peed your pants, but it’s just a feeling,” the nurses and CAT scan technician all tell me. I wait for it, but I don’t feel it. The nurse dramatically removes the heavy apron from my legs to reveal a dry lower half. 

“I really thought I peed!” I lie, because I have to give them what they’re expecting. 

At the end of more tests, I’m diagnosed with pleurisy — inflammation of the lung tissues. The doctor tells me with a wry smile and shrug, “It gets worse when you breathe, so just try not to.”

Timber

The fire department issues an order to clear land, trim branches, and minimize the fuel for fires created by the drought. My landlady godmother hires someone to trim a few branches that are touching my house. I take Ladybird to the beach and to walk around town so we can both be spared the anxiety of hearing chainsaws all morning. 

When we return, I stand, stunned, and I weep. The redwood by the front door, Tasha’s “little sister,” has been stripped bare. The oak that rose up to my office windows, in which I watched families of birds nest and feed, is now a stump. My treehouse hideaway is now a public performance space any time I walk into the living room or office, or when I lay on my porch bed on the deck. Neighbors begin shouting salutations at me from the street below every time they look up and see me. My house was one of heartbreak, but it was also my house of chosen hermitude and now that choice has been stripped away with the branches. I spend hours sitting in my ghost phone booth, or crouched by the pink cupboards, the only places to be out of sight. 

I see Henry Miller’s face at the fireplace, read his letters stored in the basement below, circle the drink rings on the window sill with my finger and imagine which are his. I’ve held these connections to him before I even lived here, but I know they’re imagined. I know I have no right to him, that we have no bearing on each other. Something about his Brooklyn accent and his bald head and books about traveling and fucking and living in these places I’ve lived make it hard to give him up, to forfeit this home where he spent so much time. 

The trees have come down, and Ladybird is leaving. Why stay? Henry would have left. He would have decided that he got what he needed and it was time to go, but he would always send letters back here. I’ll do the same. I start with a letter to my godmother to tell her I’m leaving. After she reads it, she comes bounding down the path that connects our houses, wraps me in a hug, and reminds me that she was miserable when she lived here, too. Reminds me of the previous tenants — one who died of cancer, one who got divorced, one who kept the blinds closed for 8 years and whose single piece of furniture was a couch, askew in the middle of the room. This is not a place of happiness for most people. I can box up my books, I can close the ghost phone booth, I can write about it from afar instead of from inside. I know I spent my time here trying harder, at everything, than I ever have.

Body

My blood pressure has been low for so many years that I have a disclaimer: “I’m a fainter.” But now my blood pressure is surging. It’s so high that every nurse and doctor who takes it shakes their stethoscope when they see the reading, convinced it’s erroneous. How can this wisp of a human, 5 feet tall and 100 pounds, have blood pressure so high? That they think their machinery is wrong instead of my body is among the highest compliments I can remember being given in my life.

The force inside my veins is too high to be contained. My blood is too stressed and my veins are too small to give my blood a proper course. The blood needs to explode outside of my body and towards another body that can accept it, that can host it. I chart my blood pressure and track it, and try to think of things that feel calming when I’m taking a reading, but all of the things that used to make me feel calm — Daniel, Rufus, Ladybird, Leo — all make my pulse jump now, where I can hear it and feel it throbbing in my ears. 

At the doctor’s look of genuine concern, I finally submit and remove all of the risk factors. The alcohol, nicotine, drugs, paralytic hours on the couch, birth control pill, salt, caffeine, oversleeping, undersleeping. I only let my body have the wholest, purest foods, I only drink water. I leave what’s left in the other bottles on the sidewalk for a brave soul to take a chance on a street swig. I throw out all the cigarettes, I don’t even use the gum or the patch, I just stop. I only take the pills I’m supposed to, the ones that I imagine bubbling to my brain. I run for miles and miles, I pick up weights and put them back down again and again. My 25 year old body would have noticed these changes. My 34 year old body doesn’t. Its constitution stays exactly the same, puffy belly and thighs, dry hair, bloodshot eyes, and still, the high blood pressure. None of these changes has altered the race track I have for my blood. It needs miles more of a course than I can give it. 

Still more of my body begins to reject me when half of my front, bottom left tooth jumps out of my mouth and falls into the sink. I stand, stunned, staring at this off white chunk lying matter-of-factly next to the drain. I stare at my mouth in the mirror. The tooth has broken off horizontally, and has left one, single spike daggering upwards, a sword being held to the sky. I can’t get a dentist appointment for two days, and by then my tongue is shredded and bleeding, because I can’t stop touching my suicidal tooth with my tongue. I poke at it ceaselessly. The dentist doesn’t immediately file off the dagger, which he acknowledges by asking “Couldn’t stop with your tongue, huh?” Before filing it down, he takes x—rays of my mouth for 20 minutes. I poke my tongue at the dagger the whole time, reminding myself that x—rays are what I wanted. But for some reason, x—rays of my teeth don’t satisfy what I’d wanted to see. He creates a new half—tooth for me, and when he shines the UV ray light in my mouth to harden the liquid, I think I’m in the sun. It’s the first time I’ve felt warm since Leo left on his motorcycle trip.