It’s strange to be in the world again, upright for hours at a time, strange to be a person who stands up and walks around and runs errands, albeit slowly, and is only in bed 60 percent instead of 90 percent of the day. I’m not sure how to be that person yet, and it’s strange to venture outside the world of my bed, my room, my house. I walk slowly, and struggle with the pain of my self in recovery—the high-pressure headache, the “off”-ness I feel when I’ve been upright for too long. It takes focus to walk my therapeutic twenty-minute slow walks around the blocks near my house, and I feel a little bit like an impostor, or at least like a tourist, or at least like a person visiting a place they lived a long time ago and moved away from, who remembers some things but has forgotten others, or who has been away for so long the landscape has changed and all they can see are the differences: new construction where a church used to be, the old restaurant replaced by a new one, with the attendant sense of carrying around with them the person they used to be when they lived there. And yet I still live here, I have lived here, I didn’t move away, I never left. It’s still all new.
On one of these walks, passing by a place that when I got sick was a neighborhood bar but is now a Korean fusion restaurant, I run into a friend, who stops me on the sidewalk by saying, “Oh my god! I haven’t seen you in forever! How are you? What have you been up to? Have you been working on another book?”
I don’t have words, and I pause too long, and I see her panic with concern for me, but I can’t begin to answer. I feel like I’m visiting from another planet, and trying to explain what I’ve been up to is like trying to explain how to breathe air in a place with no oxygen. I have to explain the rocket, the liftoff, the journey, the suit, the apparatus, the lonely planet, the trip home. Working on another book seems just as foreign and unlikely an endeavor. Merely answering the question seems as foreign and unlikely an endeavor.
Finally, I say something, because she is hugging me, saying, “Oh god, are you okay?” And I tell her I’m fine, I’m fine, I was sick, but I’m fine, and I’m divorced now, but I’m fine, and the kids are fine, and we’re all fine, and I’m lucky, but we’re fine.
“What happened?” she asks, and even though she has a friend standing there with her, a stranger I’m sure doesn’t want to know what happened, this friend seems to genuinely want to know my answer, or my demeanor is worrying enough to demand an explanation, and so I begin to tell her—the flu, the cough, the strange headache, the diagnosis, the divorce, the nine months of pain, of waiting, of things falling apart, of worry, of not writing or thinking or doing much more than the basics of lying down and trying to be present for my kids, even though I was like a ghost of myself. I explain it to her, not the full story, because I don’t know how to begin to tell it then, but the facts of it, as I can remember them, and I try to communicate to her the strangeness of it, then and now, and how even standing there talking to her is a strangeness, because of how I’m standing instead of lying down, and how my head still isn’t used to standing, and how my brain is still recovering from all those months of bruising, and how I don’t know yet whether or not the leak is fixed, it’s been two months, almost three months since I was patched, and I won’t know for maybe six months if I’m really okay, whether the leak is truly repaired, and the whole time I’m telling her this, I’m thinking What is her name?—this person I’ve known for roughly sixteen years, who lives blocks away from me, whose kids are the same age as mine. What is her name? I tell her the whole story without remembering her name, and she hugs me fiercely and says she’s so glad I’m doing better, and then she looks me in the eye and asks, “Can I tell, like, everyone in the neighborhood about this?” and I say sure, because that will save me from explaining, if I ever run into anyone, and they’ll all know what happened without having to ask me “What happened?” while I stand there pausing and saying “Well . . .” as I try to gauge what’s easiest to say.
She says goodbye, and I continue on my way, but after standing and talking for so long, I’m exhausted. My brain tires so easily of telling stories, of understanding stories. It needs so much rest, and stories demand so much energy.
I don’t mean to be an unreliable narrator, but sometimes that’s what happens.
Sometimes I say, “I had a tough year, but it’s better now.”
Sometimes I say, “Oh, the kids, they’re doing great. What about yours?”
Sometimes I say, “Yeah, I had a weird thing happen with my brain, but it’s okay now, I think it’s fixed, it could be fixed, or I might have to go back, I don’t know yet, I just kind of have to wait and see, I’ll only know if I’m better if I stop being better, if it stops working, if I
