Phenomenology

It’s the middle of the night, and my boyfriend is trying to wake me up. He runs a hand along my ribs, my shoulders, my chest, my legs. Gentle, gentle.  But less than half awake, I’m not a person. I’m dreaming, and my body is a series of metal poles, tubes, laid out in a row.  Rotating like the machine they use to keep hotdogs warm in gas stations. I feel ancient. 

In the morning, he says that I asked him, “Are you six years old?” This makes sense to me. 

Tulips continue to grow after they’ve been cut. 

Every week this month, a woman comes from the rotary club, her wagon full of bundled flowers.  I place them around the hotel lobby, and they rise out of their vases long and red, roused and excitable.  

A woman who I work with comes in.  I find her confusing. “Alaura, can you…” a gesture. Incomplete sentences, trailing off without an end. Corporate jargon. We must synergize. 

She takes a pair of scissors and starts cutting the tulips down. 

Blown out and loose, petals wide like open palms, showing their stamen, they will  be replaced that afternoon. I tell her this, but she doesn’t stop. “They grow, and so you have to…” Sawing, determined. Petals shaking down into the trash. I give her a pair of floral shears. 

She asks me to take over. 

Her back turned, going back to the office, I throw the bouquets away. 

Personally, I like the long stems. 

Unable to exist with the silence and too lazy to burn more CD’s and unwilling to download Spotify onto my phone, I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts, mostly Dear Hank and John. 

In an episode, I don’t know which one, John Green talks about recovering from a nervous breakdown. Intensive therapy and making pottery and uncovering one’s core beliefs. “Everyone is deserving of love and compassion, except for me. I’m terrible, I’m a monster. Everything I have is undeserved.” Etc. 

I’m  grateful that even at my worst, most depressed, these are not the kind of things that harm me. In my thoughts, I am not the problem. Instead, mostly,  the belief is that everything is hard, and this is a terrible thing. 

Everything, too, hard in equal measure. Cooking, and cleaning, and making art. Brushing my teeth. Doing my taxes. Texting my mom. All of it takes the same amount of effort, and all of it, often, seems like Too Much for me. 

It’s gotten bad again, these last two weeks. I haven’t been writing, or journaling, or eating right. Living off of bread and crackers and candy. Socializing, Easter weekend, and laying in bed for everything after. I go to work, and then I hold myself very still in the soft and the warm and the silence, the only way it seems like I can stand it, the only place that feels right. 

Not a feeling, really. Commiserating with my roommate, standing in the kitchen, finally doing the dishes. “I’m not depressed. I just can’t do it.” It, everything. They understand. 

Boyfriend tells me about how he has tricked himself into believing he likes hard things, and so suddenly, it’s doable. He works very hard, in general. All nighters and finals week and I vow to be determined in tandem, but it rarely works out, the two of us on different time lines and skill levels and motivational frequencies. 

But I managed to trip over its alternate, recently. A liar, unable to say that I like hard things, to conjure that determined feeling, I can still manage to say that it’s easy. It’s what got me to go grocery shopping, and to do the dishes. Even this – It’s literally easy. It’s easy it’s easy it’s easy. 

Long term effectiveness unproven. But I’m trying. 

“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will… God Bless the Great People of Iran!” News articles, first thing in the morning. Stomach ache, paralysis. And I have to keep answering the phone, and cutting tulips, and smiling. Have a wonderful vacation.

Why do we let this keep happening?