Today I slept until a few minutes before noon. I drank my coffee on the couch with Woody before the sunbeam hit his chair and he followed it, just like he does every day.
I ordered a custom-designed curl cream and a heavy down alternative pillow. The former is because someone recently told me he liked the slight frizz my curls get on the third day after shampooing, and I no longer want to do anything he likes. The latter because, after being unceremoniously ditched three weeks ago, I spent the night in an expensive hotel, crying into the most luxurious pillow I have ever experienced. I’d like to sleep on it when I’m not crying, but I’m not going back to that hotel.
I’m supposed to be in Chicago right now, full of Polish food and the comradery of far-flung friends gathering in a central location, probably napping on the overstuffed faux leather couch in my favorite AirBnB’s living room in the same sunbeams my cat follows all day.
But I canceled yesterday when I was supposed to be leaving.
I have a good reason—for over three weeks my right ear has been filled with fluid. It started the day after I arrived home from Los Angeles, as has happened the last three times I’ve visited LA, and after one New Orleans trip. This affliction, which doesn’t really hurt, has been misdiagnosed as swimmer’s ear—I haven’t swam—and a perforated eardrum. One of the misdiagnoses led to an anaphylactic nearish-death experience.
This time, I opted to see if it would clear on its own. It hasn’t. So I saw a third ENT, who diagnosed me with “Malignant Otitis Externa.” That’s the adequately terrifying name for the worst kind of ear infection, one that, in ten percent of reported cases, kills the patient. Odds of death during knee replacement surgery: .01%.
I’m not going to die yet. I just have a collection of green pus in my middle ear that sloshes when I move my head or swallow. I think of it as a poison that entered my body around four weeks ago when things went to shit. Maybe holding onto the wet pressure in my head a bit longer felt like buying some time to let those who left my life return. A physical manifestation of the emotional pain that comes with not knowing.
Because of the allergy scare with antibiotics last time, I’m relegated to some old-school hardcore antibiotics: giant blue capsules to choke down every six hours, along with thick eardrops overflowing my ear canal three times a day. The kind of antibiotics that destroy every microbe in the body. Cleaning the body like they’re trying to get their deposit back from the landlord.
In the past—by which I mean a month ago—I would have pushed through and gone to Chicago, keeping my bovine antibiotics and drops in my purse for on-time dosing while I did my usual chasing around, and I would have loved it. My ear still would have healed, the infection just adding a little bit of work and discomfort to my trip.
Here’s the thing: I am so sick of everything adding a little bit of work and discomfort to my life at every turn. And I think, when we finally get sick of everything worthwhile being a little bit of work and discomfort, that’s when we are old.
I am there.
For a few days, I’ve imagined what my life would be like if I just … stopped. Just stop everything that’s not necessary. Stop traveling, trying to publish the Woody Guthrie book, writing the second book, nursing a social life, and nurturing connections. Just … stopped.
What have I gotten from any of these things recently? Malignant otitis externa. Heartbreak. A smaller circle of connection. Less money. More stress. Some more heartbreak. Lectures. Informed of my mistakes in being both a friend and a mother. Abandoned.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained. But what, really, have I gained? I’m having a hard time seeing how any of the things that seem to define me have benefited me.
My initial thought a few days ago when I first realized that hey, I don’t have to do any of this shit that has defined me was, “… but quitting these things isn’t like you. You’re not the type who gets up, goes to work, watches her stories (usually while high) at the end of the day, and goes to bed before the hours hit double-digits.”
Except I am. In recent months that’s when I’ve been happiest.
In October, everything I thought I needed to do to be true to myself crashed and burned. So who am I now? I don’t know yet. I just know that I’m not doing shit for a while. This week I’ll dote on CJ when they’re home for Thanksgiving. I’m going to cook. I’m going to make my scheduled trip to New Orleans, and that is it.
When I mentioned this plan to a couple of friends and my therapist, they all said the same thing: a break will do you good! But I don’t see this as a break. It feels like a sea change.
I did all this work to get my knees and back functioning so I could live a particular lifestyle that suited me. There’s an irony to everything being fixed and deciding that, nah, I’m done. My knees and I will be watching “Seinfeld” reruns until we nod off.
Remember the great exodus of people from my life a few weeks ago? It was so recent, but feels like another lifetime. One where I went places, did things, had adventures and fodder for a lifetime of stories, which is all I thought I wanted. It’s not enough. I don’t ever want to feel the way I felt in the last 10 days of October again. I want to do everything I can to avoid feeling that way.
I’m starting to hear from some of the people who left me with silence in October. A week ago last Tuesday I got a text from the alcoholic friend who lost his sobriety.
When we got the okay to turn on our phones as my plane landed in Burbank a month ago tomorrow, I had a text from him that he’d lost his job. I asked why. Because he drank. Why the fuck did you drink? Because I’m an addict. Yeah, you’re an addict who stopped doing the work.
Three weeks of silence, absolutely no sign that this friend was dead or alive, and then a text telling me he was listening to Jeff Tweedy on the local public radio station.
Like those three weeks didn’t exist. Like my birthday wasn’t one of those days. Like my life went on business as usual while one of my most beloved people was M.I.A. after losing nine months of sobriety, contributing to the days of crying and grieving.
It took me a week to answer. I tried waiting until I was no longer angry, but that time didn’t come. So I texted back that until he has a few months of sobriety, I’m not here and I’d keep his number blocked until sometime in January.
And then I blocked his number.
As my therapist said, “Did he think you wouldn’t notice and he could sneak back in?” Apparently.
Today, the person I adore who didn’t want to hug me on my birthday because of my perfume texted for the first time since October 22nd. For years we’ve had a habit of occasionally texting photos of our morning coffee or the place where we were drinking it, a wordless way of having coffee together.
Today’s text was a photo of the shop we last visited. Like we were there yesterday.
I asked if that was the place we went together, even though I knew. Made a comment on my favorite of their specialty drinks, collected the heart emoji, and that was it.
Did he think I wouldn’t notice and he could sneak back in?
That leaves one who hasn’t attempted to slide back in. The one who left me sobbing in that perfectly soft and malleable pillow with the crisp, cool case.
In the short time we were reconnected we had a few “joking” conversations about being confrontational. He was under the impression that I am. Probably because he was once on the receiving end of a confrontation with me. I explained that while I don’t enjoy confrontation or look for it, or argue for sport, I will, if I must, tell someone things they need to hear but might not want to hear.
We even joked about his belief that I was confrontational the night of the Wilco show. I had refrained from telling the talkers next to us to shut the hell up, settling for a few stern glares.
And I’m just paranoid enough to think that maybe all of this silence is an attempt for him to prove himself right, provoke me into proving him right, that I’m a confrontational, dangerous woman who needs to be abandoned as quickly as possible.
I won’t give in to it. I’m too tired. I’m too drained. And I fucking hate confrontations.
In my Facebook memories this week on November 14th, there were two examples in different years where I had initiated confrontations on that day. One was in 2019 when Missouri’s head of the Department of Health got caught tracking women’s periods for anti-abortion reasons. I happened to see him the day after I started my period and informed him of the bloody state of my uterus. I’ve already forgotten what the other November 14th confrontation was since it wasn’t as sensational as the 2019 one, but I remember thinking the other day that it was justified and I had zero regrets in speaking up.
I wonder if, when men do these things they’re told they’re authentic, no-bullshit, and honest instead of “confrontational.”
So I’m taking myself out of the potential confrontations. After I spent too much money on that customized curl cream I remembered that I was not planning on being social and I don’t care.
But I do enjoy having pretty curls for myself. They keep me from going completely Miss Havisham. Soft and touseled, fragile and untouchable.