ghost
November 30 to December 6
Sunday
We’ve reached the time of year when at 4 p.m. the dark has already slipped through the windows and reached out its long shadowed fingers to envelop you. The dark disorients; it depletes. And every year I try, unsuccessfully, to fight against it, to remain lucid and whole.
Today I pull vitamin D from the cabinet, unscrew the lid, and pop a capsule into my mouth, swallow. I look out to the clouds; they are a bright gray, and I use that brightness to calculate how much time I have left. Hours.
Hours of light still, but I do not feel better.
I make a Christmas playlist, listen to it in the car. I’ll go shopping for decorations, lighten the house—tall red candles on the mantel, holly in a vase on the table, deep-green wreath stark against bright-yellow front door. Fresh scent of fir when you enter. I play a podcast, bake a half batch of cookies, read my book.
Nothing works.
Last night I had a dream that inside an unfamiliar damp building was a secret passage with warm fur-lined tunnels that led to another world where everything felt good. I woke up yearning, and in fact I’m still yearning.
Monday
I feel motivated to work for the first time in weeks—not because I actually want to but because I have a deadline. Whatever, I’ll take it. It’s momentum.
Miraculously, the momentum carries me until three, until the sky turns a molten blue and the clouds grow heavy and sag. A sheet of rain pours from beneath them. I can’t work in these conditions; it’s too depressing. Dour wet encases the house, walls of coffin. I’m trapped.
I shut my laptop, turn off the desk light, and walk downstairs as a ghost, my mind blank, my feet hovering inches above the floor. I play human to pass the time. A human eats, so I eat—but I don’t taste. I watch a show without seeing.
And I wait.
I wait, and then it’s bedtime. Pretend human in the mirror, she brushes her teeth.
Tuesday
For my walk I decide to take a trail that begins in the forest then passes on one side a horse pasture and on the other the well-tended yards of expensive-looking houses before rounding the corner of a field, at which point you cross a wooden footbridge and can either continue straight, through a tunnel of towering inward-curled bushes, or turn left toward . . . Well, I don’t know where left goes. I’ve never turned there, have only thought about it.
Today the horses in the pasture are not near me, do not even lift their gazes; they’re farther out. It’s close to sunset, and the moon, nearly full, floats above them. I wonder about horses and the moon, about what it feels like to have silver threads of moonrise woven through mane. I keep walking, paying close attention to what’s around me, dew clinging to the thornpoint of a leaf-bare bush, for example, and burrowing my mittened hands more deeply into their pockets. Warmth. I turn the corner, then stop abruptly. There, before the footbridge—a dog without its owner, that’s a coyote. I watch it watching me, its body still but ears perked. Curious, the both of us, but cautious.
I decide to turn back, and so does the coyote. We walk in parallel, straddling the field, between us a hawk circling low over the tall grass, looking for food.
Again past the houses and the pasture, then back through the forest. Dusk mutes the brown, turning the trail into a cathedral of dull winter woodbone, song emanating from the orange of mushroom, the green of fern, the yellow of leaves that have not yet fallen from the branches of a tree. I pause for the yellow, try to take its picture. A camera cannot capture this color—this color, its vibrancy pushed forward by that muted brown, can only be painted, but I can’t paint.
I wish I could paint.
Wednesday
Google searches:
dizziness and brain tumors
bppv vs brain tumor
bppv treatment
causes for chronic dizziness besides brain tumors and bppv
pppd
can you have bppv and pppd at the same time
how did you know you had a brain tumor reddit
The dark once inside is a contradiction: both an indifference to life and a sharpened fear of death. Silly.
Thursday
I pick up Danny from the shuttle—he’s been out of town—and when I say hi, I realize I haven’t spoken to anyone since last Friday. Well, except for Larry, a cashier at the grocery store, who asked me about my Thanksgiving yesterday, told me about his. Now, here in the car, my voice doesn’t even sound like mine. The pitch is higher, the timbre distorted. Like everything I’m saying could be a joke.
This voice is a mask, something I unconsciously place in front of myself to create distance. I hate it. But once it starts, I don’t know how to stop it.
Friday
When I first open my eyes, I think I’m up early—but no; it’s just that gloomy. Eight is the hue of seven. I pull back the covers and pad to the window in my slippers, shut it. Outside, wall of gray where there’s usually water, mountains. I can’t see past the yard. The gloom spiders up my shoulder, up my neck, across my temple. It lands as a tightness behind my eyes, then a blunt throbbing. The headache lasts all day.
Saturday
Halfway through my walk, it starts to rain. I’m too far in to turn back, so I just . . . accept it. Actually, I start to enjoy it. Soft mist settles on the rounds of my cheeks. I touch the back of my hand to it, wet blush.
This loop along the bluff I have wandered so many times that individual plants are now familiar to me. That’s one of the best parts of being human: You can develop relationships with outside things; you can give a tree a personality, call it friend.
I look around.
Surrounded by tall evergreens still as statues is a skinny, short one. No branches but at the top a great poof of green. Quite a rebellious haircut. Teenager, probably.
Farther along, a single mushroom of deep red grows out from a mound of needle and moss. A pioneering spirit.
Four delicate pink fungi with caps like umbrellas cling to the knobby arm of a trunk. They’re dancing—ballet, en pointe. They each have an attitude of superiority, but I really can’t blame them. They move beautifully.
I watch them dance, take a deep, slow breath in, press my fingertip to the hollow of bark next to the whirl of pirouette.
I listen to the patter of rain on leaves—pulse of forest—to my own footsteps affirming that I, too, am alive.