There's an old Married with Children that sticks out in my memory when Al Bundy is, for whatever reason, in Hell, and has and makes a bargain to do something redemptory with some devil or angel, and goes over the terms of the agreement, at the end of which he says for reassurance "Then my life will go back to the normal hell I live in, right?"
For the nine months since my last relationship breakup, I've been living back in my parents' house, which is exactly where everybody wants you to live when you're thirty-nine. I came over mid-pandemic to get away from solitary confinement during a period when solitude would have been a terrible idea. I planned on leaving in May, but my grandmother needed hospice care, and I stayed both to help take care of her and babysit my nephew while others did, but like we all occasionally do, I stayed afterward out of entropy.
In these three quarters of a year, I visited my apartment maybe half-a-dozen times, including twice this weekend. And now it's Thursday and I've returned for the day...
The apartment is precisely the mess I left it in November - same books on the sofa, the bed unmade, the dishes still in the sink, the same shopping bags I use for recycling still on the ground. In April I finally cleaned out my refrigerator and the gunk from rotting fruit is still on the shelves; there are even a pepper shaker and salt grinder still on my piano. The posters are still up on the walls, and the "Wall of Depression" I keep in my kitchen is still there (the place dirty enough that I know nobody will want to go in but me...): Goya's Sleep of Reason, Rembrandt's Lamentations of Jeremiah and Doubting Thomas, Picasso's Don Quixote and Blue Guitarist, and two Van Gogh self-portraits... giving me the same reassurance as ever that the interminable modulations of temper will continue their cycles, in its beginning is its end, and to everything there is a season.
The seasons do not get shorter as I age, though my physical stamina to endure them does. So much of what used to be palliatives, epic binges of food and alcohol, grow more unendurable as the heart rate goes up, the esophagus speaks more volatily, and the memory jogs far more slowly. The last one hurts particularly - the savantine sponge by which I knew there were compensatory rewards for what I must endure shrinks in my late 30s to unreliability. Hour-long pieces of music I could hear clearly enough to write out every detail by memory grow hazy, sentences in foreign languages blur together in a European fruit punch, lines of poetry I used to know by heart I have to look up to remember...
I'm not like you all. Most of you think linearly, but this mind has only ever thought in circles and thinks at a thousand miles a minute. You might think that a boast within a complaint, and perhaps it is - I'm a human encyclopedia, or at least I was... but I would not wish this brain on my worst enemy and wish only to get off an out-of-control ride that has never brought me anything but a barely endurable train of thoughts which spiral into every manner of mental conmorbidity. This mind has only ever worked when it's distracted, and if it does not operate in a constant state of overstimulation, it stimulates itself into anguish that dictates when it ceases and when it starts. It's a separate brain within the brain, a second personality within the body of Evan Tucker - I've taken call him AC Charlap, larger-than-life, grandiose in his ambitions and agonies, full of obsessive thoughts that cross the border into psychotic every minute of the day, only able to wrest himself out of abysmal desolations after being pulled fully in by a cerebral chamber of horrors - will he one day be unable to get out? But Evan, the real Evan, only ever wanted to be a nice Jewish boy living a quiet life in a modest American city, and would give anything to wrest control of this brain from a mental pirate who long ago stole what was not his.
I don't know what else to write... If only I could write a memoir of this madness, but the demons are so deep and controlling and painful, I doubt I have anything like 10% the strength.
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