face off
I’m like Nicolas Cage in Face Off: I look like John Travolta: John Travolta’s wife lets me into their home, everyone who loves John Travolta gets close to me, and then the monster behind the face they love comes out. I look like my usual self — or until this week I did — but I don’t behave like the person Steve loves, and this is because of the drugs.
And now I look different, too: the drugs caused me to bloat up enough to weigh six pounds more than I weighed last week. I keep bumping into things.
The drugs explain the fatigue — I can fall asleep in the middle of the afternoon, every afternoon. I have been known to fall asleep in the dog bed in my studio. I come home and the writing on my hand — all my to-do lists of the things I have slept away — ends up imprinted backwards on my cheek.
Steve says if this cycle is cancelled or doesn’t work, he may die of alcohol poisoning. We have had difficult moments before, but I haven’t wanted to disappear before. I want to run away from all this ugly chemical pain. Run away from myself, unrecognizable. Two years of swirling tightly in a holding pattern.
I want to remember to be grateful, and sometimes I can, but it is difficult when the drugs injected into my thigh shut down the putuitary gland in my brain and take the muscles out of my arms, turn my flesh to jelly, make me forget, and insert a sadness that sucks the sound out of where I used to hear singing.
We are so fragile, carefully composed of chemicals, hormones, synapses. One shift and all shifts. Maybe more sugar will right the balance inside; now maybe more salt.
