"Gray Matter" and The July 15th Cycle
Sometimes all you can smell is blood. It’s the iron supplement: taking too much, it’s all you can taste.
It’s hard to pull yourself out of the clouds when you don’t want to leave—I mean, so much gets done there! It’s good to feel removed and separated from the rest until your human needs kick in again. Then, to tie yourself back to your body and your past, it’s a whole ordeal. I make the same mistake of realizing the vastness of my humanity every few weeks or so. Quarantine has made the cycle painfully apparent. Maybe I can Vitamin D3 and iron supplement my way out of it.
The reality is that my body can sense the past ages before my mind. I realized last week that, two years ago, I was in an entirely different situation, family, and music-less world. It was the summer of me and my dad, since my mother was otherwise incapacitated. I don’t remember writing much over that period, and my searches through Google Doc files and pieces have proved as much. When a parent is dying there is not much else to do besides wake up and fight. And I mean literally fight—every single day, I fought with logical and illogical arguments with a deeply sick person who refused treatment. No fiction description could memorialize well the sight of your parent with wax paper skin and morning angry eyes. Perhaps those who have seen their parent battle cancer can relate on some level. The notable exception in my situation was this inescapable barrier of choice: she was in the clouds too, making the biggest decision to fully sever mind from body, but in the slowest way possible.
I wrote nothing over that summer, but did, months after, in the clouds. March 2019: I was recently fully employed, and the egg timer of trauma processing finished 7 months too late.
It was a horror piece about waking up in a Thanksgiving dinner where one of the members of the table (you can guess who) was just as rotting and food-like as the actual dinner. It’s a beautifully disgusting read.
“An indefinite amount of time passed in the mesmerization of bowls, serving dishes of buttery starches, tender meat, greasy greens until she felt a pull and looked up and found herself staring into the leathery face of her mother, if you could call her that. Her mother’s face had shrunken down into a half-skull, half-flesh pasted doll of a face. Her blue eyes were blinding behind the faded brown and yellow of the papery scab where skin should’ve been. And when she spoke, words blew dry and slid out like splintered wood into your ears.”
If reality is horrible, make it horror. Make it feel repulsive because it is. Share it on the Internet because you’re two years past it. In the context of the current pandemic, I was so much freer back then, even in that Stephen King “Gray Matter” situation, which is laughable. I look at photos of my dad and I visiting Commissary! on July 15, 2018 and all I can think is “man, what I wouldn’t give to be at a restaurant right now.” That day was a good day regardless of any context, though. July 15th in the following year would bring similar feelings of out of place prosperity as I experienced my first adult life piano lesson. Man, what I wouldn’t give to be in my cramped music school practice room right now.
On July 22, 2018 I won the final argument and successfully managed to hospitalize my mother. I spent the entire night in the ER being yelled at and passing on those grey no skid psych ward socks, but it was finally done.
I remember my last in person piano lesson before stay in place measures truly kicked in. Even so, going in that building felt illegal. I was the last lesson before the music school would be shutting down and shifting to entirely online operations. The building was jarringly silent for a music/dance school; without people in the halls the gray ceiling, gray wall paint, gray flooring was grossly highlighted, and I had to be escorted to an industrial sink to thoroughly wash my hands. I laugh thinking about the COVID nightmare of my teacher and me, both mask-less, in the same tiny practice room for an hour thinking a few swipes of Clorox wipes on the keyboard had disengaged the pandemic. Ah, the follies of youth.
By 2019 I had started writing regularly, because music had entered my life again. July 15, 2019: I have an entry from that day, and the day after that, and the weeks following. I won’t share those here because I’m still too close to the person I was then. Music is the definitive timeline of how old I’m getting. Without it, it was scrambles to wear too-pink outfits and photograph bagel toasts.
July 15, 2020, July 22, 2020. Jeez, we’re not even there yet.