“When did it start?” is the hardest question to answer, because I don’t even know what it is.
I could say March 21, 2015, around 10:30 A.M., because that’s when I had the coughing fit.
I could say about a week after that, because that’s when I first started to realize that the sneaking, nagging headache was becoming something constant and unrelenting.
But I could also say any moment of any day of any year.
The day I sat at the keys of a concert grand, my ten-year-old hands frozen for a moment as the audience waited expectantly, my pedal foot shaking, my heart racing, my mind, for a terrible moment, entirely blank just before the second I closed my eyes and my fingers began playing the sonata that I was sure, up until then, I couldn’t remember. The day I walked by myself at night, in the Boston winter, as a teenager, and was followed into a store by a man who lingered, shadowing me, until I whispered tearfully to a kindly clerk, who kicked him out and escorted me home. The day my first ever piano was delivered to me, my engagement ring, a gift from my husband-to-be, the sun streaming through the skylights of our loft, and me standing there, thinking How do I deserve this? The day I held my newborn daughter, her drowsy baby breath in my ear still catching on hiccupy sobs as I paced the hallway of our apartment, bouncing with every step, patting her gently, easing her into sleep. The day I cried so hard after a fight with my husband, my eyes puffed shut. The day I walked off a bus and into a hailstorm, ice pellets hitting me, leaving round purple-green marks I would only discover days later, ghosts of the storm. The day I slept off a fever. The day I pushed myself through a fever. The day I was born. The day, months before I was born, when the thick membrane covering my spinal cord and brain was formed, the connective tissue connecting itself, but only thinly in this one small place that might not even matter unless I one day had a fever, left the house, went to breakfast, coughed. The day some secret was whispered to my body, the time bomb placed, the disgruntled fairy’s curse destined to come to pass, no matter how many spinning wheels are burned, no matter what steps are taken to avoid it. Any of these days could have been the day this all started, that this burgeoning thing inside me swelled, that my cerebrospinal fluid surged and my dura strained and the one thin spot became thinner, until the day it thinned so precisely it was possible for the truth to leak out.
Not everything is an epiphany. You can’t always know the precise moment you fall in love, or out of love, or when the creeping sensation you feel becomes a solid, present pain. Things happen in aggregate, they accrete. Signs accumulate until suddenly it is impossible to not see them as anything except inevitable, omnipresent. They have somehow, suddenly, always existed.
And yet I recognize this impulse, this tracing and retracing, this quest to make reliable my unreliable narration, as a way to locate this within me, literally within me, within my control, and thus within my power to change it.
I cannot change it.
“When did this start?” is the hardest question to answer, because of how it is twinned for me with its ghost question: What did you do to cause this? And the answer to that is that I coughed, and also that I had a fever, and also that I fell out of love, and also that I became unhappy, and also that I wasn’t able to overcome my unhappiness, and also that I wasn’t able to save my marriage, and also that I failed, and so when I try to answer the question “When did this start?” I am also trying to answer the questions How did I let this happen? and Why couldn’t I just be happy? and What can I do to undo this? and If I think hard enough to find my way back to the beginning, will that be enough to break the spell, undo this curse, right this wrong, make everything whole again?
“When did this start?” the doctor asks, and I say, “March, probably March, end of March.”
2
There are a lot of things you can do, it turns out, while leaking cerebrospinal fluid.
You can take a fifteen-year-old to a Twitter meet-up of fifty Ariana Grande fans, as long as you find a comfortable chair in the hotel lobby and slump down as far as you can to be as close to horizontal as possible, waving off the other parents with vague excuses about a migraine, even though it’s not a migraine, because that seems the quickest way to get people to both understand and to leave you alone, clutching the back of your head where a lump of pain has taken over the back right base of your skull.
You can serve on a jury, as long as you will yourself to not lie down on the courtroom floor, even though you mentioned to the judge that you had a something like a migraine, but that wasn’t enough to excuse you, and so it turns out you can sit up and hold the back of your head and listen to a very new lawyer extract relevant info from his very clueless
