Laurustina

The smell of pot roast is oh so pleasant. The smell of Pinesol is also pleasant. However, the smell of pot roast mixed with the smell Pinesol is unpleasant in a clothespin-on-the-nose kind of way. I can only hope that the floors will dry soon.

Nothing feels finished, except that I met an arbitrary goal. I am pleasantly surprised and proud of having done so and I have learned a variety of things along the way. The simplest to articulate are as follows:

I am more myself when I am writing.
I am more connected to myself when I am writing consistently.

The above are related but actually very different things. Having learned (or at least remembered) them, it seems obvious then that I should continue in some manner to do what I have been doing. Maybe not to such an extent that I fuck my wrists and arms and hands up, but doing at least a little of it every day. At the moment, this feels like a safe space in which to do some of that and as long as that continues to be true, I’ll try to do so.

Early this afternoon, I was curled up on the bed with Mr. J. and the pups. We were drifting, half napping, half awake until J. got up and said that he was going to get into the shower. He went into the bathroom and closed the door. I shifted positions and then my cell rang, and I wasn’t aware of answering it, but somehow it was on the pillow and this loud, so loud, and horrible music came out of it, crescendoing until I though it was going to burst my eardrums and then nothing except a whisper of hushed voices from the same source. I tried to turn the phone off, but couldn’t move and the music got loud again, shook the inside of my head again, so loud and long and then the whisper, so quiet I could barely make out words at all.

All through this, I was calling for J. and after the second bout of terrifying loudness, I started to fall over the edge of the bed, still calling out for J. to help me. Then suddenly, he was there, at the side of the bed, having just come into the room from down the hall.

He’d heard nothing except for me calling him, just that last time. The pups were still sleeping. My cell phone was out on my desk and not on the pillow beside me. I was not falling over the edge of the bed, and other than the cold sweat and my racing pulse, everything was as it should be.

A little while later, when I had calmed down, I came in to the computer and looked up auditory hallucinations, wandering around a bit until I found an entry on Wikipedia about Exploding Head Syndrome. It reads as follows:

Exploding Head Syndrome is a condition that causes the sufferer to occasionally experience a tremendously loud noise as originating from within his or her own head usually described as the sound of an explosion, roar, waves crashing against rocks, loud voices or screams, a ringing noise, or the sound of an electrical short circuit (buzzing). Sufferers often feel a sense of fear and anxiety after an attack, accompanied by elevated heart rate. It can also cause the sufferer to feel an extreme rush or adrenaline kick going through his or her head, sometimes multiple times. In most cases, it occurs when they are in a state between light asleep and wakefulness and can be accompanied by Sleep Paralysis.

Well then. Welcome to my exploding head syndrome. I suppose that the good news is, it is not (as one prone to finding new things to fear and worry about might immediately worry about) a sign or symptom of encroaching madness, a brain tumor or some spooky poltergeist.

I open Facebook this morning and scroll down the live feed to see what I’ve missed in the night. There is a reminder tucked in among the status updates and Mafia requests and variety of links, a notice that November 20th is the Transgender Day of Remembrance.

They’re having a candlelight vigil in Santa Cruz tonight and I wish I could be there. I click on the reminder and it takes me to the page of the organization which founded the event, intended to raise awareness of violence against trans-people. There’s a downloadable spreadsheet on the site where someone has meticulously cataloged the names and dates and violent deaths of more than five hundred transgender men and women worldwide. It is a sobering read. In California alone, there have been 57 violent deaths this year.

The first trans-person I ever knew was not my friend The Poet, though he taught me more than anyone about gender identity. The first trans-person I knew was a woman I worked with in a little greenhouse company here in the valley, during my sophomore year of college. She was the daughter of the company’s founder and the sister of its CEO. To their credit, they did not ostracize her completely. To their shame, they tucked her away in a back office and kept her out of the public eye. She was in her mid fifties, a seemingly sad and awkward woman and the butt of many an office joke. Even then, knowing as little as I did about, well much of anything, I thought it was a horrible way to treat someone who so obviously had been through so much. But oh, a “man in a dress” is still one of those things that

makes people giggle
makes people stare
makes people whisper
makes people feel confused
makes people uncomfortable
makes people feel threatened
makes people fearful
makes people angry
makes people violent
makes people do things they wouldn’t do, if she would just

be normal
behave
be a man
be ashamed
be quiet and stay inside
her house
her office
herself
or wherever it is people should stay,
when being who they really are “makes” other people

giggle
stare
whisper
confused
uncomfortable
threatened
fearful
angry
violent

I count myself lucky to have known and continue to know my share of strong and lovely trans men, but somehow this day reminds me especially of the brave and beautiful trans women whose paths have crossed mine, of Edna, and Dax, of my friend who I like to call The Queen of Dangerous Shoes…

…and last though never ever least, it reminds me of a certain fifteen year old boy, one I’d known quite well when he was a child, but who had become a virtual stranger by the time he said quite simply, “See, I know why I’m always angry. It’s because I’m sad. And I know why I’m always sad, it’s because I’m a girl.”

Suddenly, she was twice the stranger that he’d been moments ago, and I can’t even begin to imagine the expression on my own face, when she smiled sheepishly and said, “I am Ashlie.”

Though I cannot be with my friends tonight, I want them to know that I am there in spirit, that I honor and mourn with them at the loss of sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, parents and lovers and friends.

what does one do when one’s word-processing program starts autocorrecting each instance of the word “mother” to “motherfucker”? should one fix the program first and then worry about the implications or wash ones mouth out (or is it fingertips in this instance?) with Lava soap, pop a Xanex and take a nice little nap?

For two days, I’ve written shit, in that I’ve barely written and most of what I wrote was shit, which is interesting only in that I have apparently begun to qualify the quality as well as measure the quantity of what I’m writing.

It is 1:23 a.m., the early morning of November 1^st 2009. At the long desk in the living room of our rented Central Valley California house, my husband sits beside me. There are three dogs asleep on the couch behind us. Down the hall, my eldest sister is typing quietly on her laptop while the cat sleeps on the bed behind her and her fish has hunkered down in his castle for the night.

I am writing this here and now because I committed, less than two hours ago, to writing 1,700 words a day for thirty days. To be fair, I did this while in the middle of a bout of bagel-making, which renders me susceptible to visions of superpowers.

My sister, the one down the hall, is writing a novel. Her third for NaNoWriMo. I have begun my share of novels, but never managed finished one and while various friends have slogged through their own National Novel Writing Novembers, I have never given myself over to the process, nor am I technically doing so now. Mostly, I want to prove to myself that I can still write and honestly, the first step in doing so is giving myself the right and a reason to write again. Both of those things are important and difficult.

Committing to support my sister’s intention to write a rough draft of her novel in the space of one month (at approximately 1,700 words a day) by committing to write the same amount every day feels like an enormous commitment, as these days,  I find it difficult to commit to anything at all.

317 words in, the time change comes and we take a break for bagels. In the middle of the night, in the middle of California, on the border between October and November in the worst year of my life, my sister and I slather cream cheese on still warm chunks of sun-dried tomatoes and discuss plot and characters and such things until it is time to get back to work.

In theory, at the end of this new month, we both have a stack of pages filled with rows of words; hers, a neatly ordered novel, with plot and character development and all these nice twists and turns. While mine, well I have no fucking idea what they will be. Hell, I only committed to this three hours ago under duress, and in the glow of bagel-making in the middle of the night.

I am psychically stuck.

Paralyzed.

Today marks eight months since Ashlie’s death and my “To Do” list is still full of items like: finish Thank You notes … respond to letter from transplant family … send Brianna those photos … go through the keepsake boxes in the garage and find stuffed Blue dog.

I have passed the one-year mark of unemployment. Six month old mail sits unopened on my desk. Each day bleeds into the next, marked only by the passage of calendar pages and rare occasions (a baby shower here, a dinner out with friends there). A good day is one in which nothing specifically rotten happens and dinner is tasty and my sister consents to watching some silly reality schlock or a decent detective show with me before bed. Entire days pass during which I speak to no one beyond these four walls. I still sleep 8 to 10 hours a night and often nap  in the afternoon. The easiest hours of any day are between 5 and 10.

I haven’t cleaned out my car or had a hair cut, gone to the movies or written anything longer than a six paragraph e-mail.  The herb garden that died on   the side porch in June is still a terra cotta graveyard of twigs, now half-hidden by the branches of the rose tree, which spill over the fence from the next-door neighbor’s backyard. I am incaipable of making decisions. I frequently drop things for no discernable reason.  I rarely pick up the phone when it rings, no matter who might be on the other end of the line. I check my e-mail once every couple of days and have stopped trying to explain myself to old friends who take such things personally.

Anger is still the easiest emotion to sink into , or maybe I should say that it is where I feel safest. And there are plenty of things to get angry about. The state of our healthcare system, the state of the union, the state of my relationship with this person or that one … yes, angry suits me just fine and is a fearless barrier to the terror of grief. Tenderness is ok sometimes too, especially in light of the baby girls that have been popping up every couple of months, ’round the edges of my life, first Noelle, then darling Eilidh and now a grand-niece Christine. What I feared might be too sad, is surprisingly soothing and sweet.

The grief though, stalks me day and night. Always over my shoulder, or winking from some corner, even at the best of moments. She is my silent companion, waiting and hoping and begging for you and I to say her name.