There & there & back & back
This past week, I was in some unlikely places. A sports bar that had bowling lanes and rapey music. A Marriot, a beautiful beach house, a Holiday Inn Express, a hospital. That's what happens when one minute you are away at a very fun wedding doing the Jane Fonda, and the next minute you are visiting friends in the same state but on the edge of that state, and the minute after that you are getting a phone call about your mother who has suddenly become very ill and gone to the emergency room. And you think, how did I get so far away? How is it possible that two locations in the same region can be days apart? You feel terrible at math and geography, all over again. As you start driving, you have no sense of scale, because every mile seems only to draw attention to the many miles left to go, and you get pulled over for speeding by an action-figure cop and told that you must, must, appear in court on such-and-such day, or have an attorney appear for you, and what he is saying is making no impression on you whatsoever, and you want to tell him that you are driving fast because because because, but you can't or don't, and then it is over quickly and there are bad feelings in the car and you sit in silence with the ones you love. Eventually you stop for the night and you feel better, distilled, and you take a gratuitously long, gratuitously hot bath, after which you walk in your pajamas down the hall and fill the ice bucket with ice and buy a Coca-Cola and return to your room and fill one of the plastic cups in the bathroom with ice and then with the Coca-Cola. You drink a few sips while you look at your computer, and then you brush your teeth and go to sleep, thick like never, unfurling like all the road behind you and all the road ahead.
I'm tired, now, of second person--
In many respects.
In a hotel room, the actions and routines of human existence and human behavior become autistic, pronounced. The teeth brushing. The bathing. The getting dressed. The lounging. The room is made to sustain us in these moments most of all. Some people might say that hotels are made for sex, secret trysts, etc., but this is untrue. The hotel room can easily become a scapegoat, a locus for our transgressions, a no-place where consequences temporarily stop gushing, scab over, until check-out. But this to me is the least interesting aspect of the hotel room. The most interesting is how semiotic it is, how it can make a person aware of her most immediate and basic needs, and then how resolutely it can fulfill those needs. Plastic cup = thirst. Bed = sleep.
We eventually arrived, and spent time in the hospital, and felt alternately scared, sad, agitated, and reassured. We felt the immensity of family, its stupendous, incomparable weight. We stayed up very late. We brought things to the hospital, and when my mother was discharged five days later, we brought things to her at home. I made her laugh a few times but since her lung is collapsed, the laughter was painful. Still, she is supposed to do things like cough and breathe deeply, to get air back into her lung, so laughter was, actually, medicine. I feel inordinately glad, and sort of proud, when I make my mom laugh. So there were these good moments, too, however laced with wincing.
Now I am home. Today I made a clafoutis and did a fair amount of languishing. Usually when I get cracked open I spend time in repair. I'm thinking I've had it wrong. I'm trying instead to expand the fissure, really break myself apart. To let more in, and more out.
I'm tired, now, of second person--
In many respects.
In a hotel room, the actions and routines of human existence and human behavior become autistic, pronounced. The teeth brushing. The bathing. The getting dressed. The lounging. The room is made to sustain us in these moments most of all. Some people might say that hotels are made for sex, secret trysts, etc., but this is untrue. The hotel room can easily become a scapegoat, a locus for our transgressions, a no-place where consequences temporarily stop gushing, scab over, until check-out. But this to me is the least interesting aspect of the hotel room. The most interesting is how semiotic it is, how it can make a person aware of her most immediate and basic needs, and then how resolutely it can fulfill those needs. Plastic cup = thirst. Bed = sleep.
We eventually arrived, and spent time in the hospital, and felt alternately scared, sad, agitated, and reassured. We felt the immensity of family, its stupendous, incomparable weight. We stayed up very late. We brought things to the hospital, and when my mother was discharged five days later, we brought things to her at home. I made her laugh a few times but since her lung is collapsed, the laughter was painful. Still, she is supposed to do things like cough and breathe deeply, to get air back into her lung, so laughter was, actually, medicine. I feel inordinately glad, and sort of proud, when I make my mom laugh. So there were these good moments, too, however laced with wincing.
Now I am home. Today I made a clafoutis and did a fair amount of languishing. Usually when I get cracked open I spend time in repair. I'm thinking I've had it wrong. I'm trying instead to expand the fissure, really break myself apart. To let more in, and more out.
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