cure for pain
The Muse Letter No. 149
Sometimes an essay will arrive all at once in my head and writing it down is like grabbing it by its tail and throwing it onto the page and making a splash and truly not knowing what shape it will take just trying to pin down a body that is lively and moving. It takes your whole weight. It takes all my effort to not lose focus.
It’s 5.25AM on a Friday morning, I’ve been in bed most of the week unable to walk much or do the dishes. I’ve been on the phone at 1.30AM and I walked through long corridors of a hospital that looked a lot like an empty mall. Did I pass a coffeeshop? Did I pass nurses sitting in booths listening to music on their nightshift break? Did I walk past a reception, did anyone wonder what this limping woman was doing here at 3.30 in the morning?
The waiting room is empty. I hear laughter from around the corner. It’s an uncanny atmosphere as if we’re all just meeting in a dream. On the wall is a poster with four questions one should ask when talking to a doctor. The chair I sit on is particularly soft. Are you awake? Yes. Good.
The rain starts and does not stop for a whole day. I lie in bed and feel the waves of codeine trying to calm me down, trying to wrap me in a cloud and I feel the pull but I cannot give in. “Codeine is an opioid drug closely related to morphine and, like morphine, it is derived from opium poppies”, I read somewhere on the internet and I feel like Dorothy lying in a field of poppies. I must not sleep. I’ve never done well on tranquillisers. Like a kid that is forced to go to bed, my body revolts and slips out of sleep any chance it gets.
I thought I was done writing about my life. I thought fiction was on the horizon. All of April, in the midst of writing on my third book it felt like that chapter was about to close. But of course this writer cannot be stopped, cannot be told what to do, what is appropriate or sensible, she needs to spill. You have something serene and chaotic about you, someone texts me and I think of the dying fox in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist because now I guess: chaos reigns!
I look at the screenshot I took of the song I shazamed on my way to the hospital and blast it on my headphones the minute I get home. Love life and laughter is all I believe. I bop my head and throw my coat into the kitchen, the painkillers are working as I dance to bed. Catching myself in the mirror, this would be a great scene for a film one day: then I crash.