Observations II

June, early July, now

I woke early, watching as the pale yellow horizon showed itself before the sun. I heard the faint cry of a baby. Managing to get out of bed, I made the coffee and opened the windows. I kept touching my hands to my face, pressing hard on my forehead and eyebrows. I wanted to make sure I was still here. I’d told the new therapist about how it felt, to have this experience where I don’t feel real. I guess it comforted me in some way, knowing that this way a way a brain protects itself.

Walking around the neighborhood was difficult still. It strangely felt like a place I no longer belonged. As I walked up Irving, I remembered walking in the rain in January, reminding myself with each step that I wasn’t going to die. When I remember it, really, I see myself outside of myself picking up my limbs one by one and dragging them along the sidewalk. I tried now to remember that this walk, this walk which was then filled with scents of pine and cypress, was now overwhelmingly filled with bloomed magnolias and fresh cut grass, and that things change, and quickly.

I sat in the grass on someone’s front lawn willing to take the risk of being yelled at. I’d noticed myself disassociating again. I’d barely made it to the end of the block before I became emotional and forced myself to keep walking, reminding myself that I am alive still, and not to worry. Turning the corner, the sun shot down the avenue and shined directly on my cheeks.

I looked down the next block and noticed it was blurry. I’d imagined myself to laying down in the street, thinking maybe it would make the disassociation stop if a car came fast and at me. I decided instead to keep walking down 3rd Street where there were cars I could hear with my ears and where the sun would keep shining on me.

I waited for the moon to rise, something else to do besides ruminate in the trappings of paranoia. I put on Standard Time Vol. 2: Intimacy Calling, a Wynton Marsalis record that instantly comforts me. Other sounds include: any saxophone, the sound of Miles Davis’ voice, keys jangling in the door, a lawnmower, the sound of the coffee machine starting, dragracing, sometimes a jackhammer, the double beep that signals the car is locked and he’s coming inside now.

I suddenly hated all the furniture, especially and shockingly enough, the couch I had loved so much. The one we’d covered from its original fish textile to a yellow cotton linen that became slowly sunfaded in our living room in Hollywood. I had a desire to set everything in the apartment on fire: the sideboard purchased in October at the Santa Monica flea market, the walnut dining room table that sits for eight people, and sometimes even 12 or more if you squeeze, the rug that came the first week of the new year, the bike in the garage, the brand new bed frame that came in November, the TV, and the wooden trout on a pedestal bought last summer in Nantucket.

The mornings last until the sun comes out. These days that means 2pm. I putz around the apartment, still in amazement at its size. The days are as grey as they start.