Odes

Not long ago, I went for a long run, made dinner and called a friend to celebrate all the goodness that I was finding in my life.  I was finally moving forward and gaining momentum after years of slogging, dragging and deep emotional pain (much of it self inflicted).  I was finally feeling pride in what I was doing, who I was becoming and what I was capable of.

I went to bed filled with heaps of promise.

I woke up two days later in a world split in two, unable to stand up straight, trapped in an unsettling nightmare.

How quickly promise seemed to dissipate.

Just like that, literally overnight (two nights, really), my life would start over.  I would lay there in a coma while a reset button was pushed, shoving some part of me to the end of its life span and awakening another.  The scar of the entire strange journey was left in my heart, details of the events are buried in the mess that would become my thoughts.

And my thoughts are a complete mess. Months of doctors, hospital stays, diagnostic procedures, therapy (cognitive, occupational, physical, psychoanalytic) and wrestling with insurance over it all.  Months of sobbing daily.  Months of a constant deluge of harsh reality and sleep. Oh sweet wonderful sleep without you I could not have endured this horrid chapter.  An ode to sleep is yet to come, but for now…

Strings of my messy thoughts are being pieced together in an attempt to straighten up, put things in place.  I have hope of stringing the strings together to write something coherent. For now, strings are the start.

String #1: Rapid Aging

To most people strokes are an inevitable reality of aging and as a result I was thrust into this absolute desperation to keep a grip on my age.  Just 35, only 35.  Repeat.  This mantra, this small but critical phrase needed to be chanted several times a day, everyday.  Lost are the exact numbers of times people would stop and apologize for this unfortunate “thing” happening and then inevitably share tales of the stroke their grandmother suffered and her victorious survival and recovery, but with only a few permanent losses in cognition. Somehow, this made me feel worse.  Just 35, only 35. I felt like I needed an anchor to grip on to, keeping me here, this side of 70, at the mid-point, in my supposed youth.  The youth that would be slipping away from me, the youth that had been yanked out from underneath me.  Suddenly I was made equivalent to a senior citizen and I wasn’t quite ready for that life stage just yet.  Wondering where I had lost all those years along with my vision, my ability to link coherent, cognizant ideas together, I would sit in silence.  Often.  Alone with my racing, random thoughts, eyes fixated on the ceiling, trying to get it to become one and making peace with the fact that not only had my vision doubled, but so had my age over the course of two nights of sleep.  Years of life. Blink. Just like that. Gone.

Picture from Dawson's office for the next few weeks. Hyalite Canyon. It's not far from the house, but far enough to fill you up with wild goodness for the day; sunshine and snow covered, wind-blown goodness.

Supposedly I’m going to inject a little poetic cadence into this day by adding a bit of prose to this here blank canvas, but it’s nowhere to be found this fine evening.  Drained.  Completely drained.  Feeling like an American, longing for calories and laziness. There’s not even success to be had in the calorie consumption arena due to laziness winning out.  Tonight its a war against entropy and the force has me in its body-in-repose-stays-in-repose grip.  Granted the day brought good things or so I recall, strangely.

What is it about certain days that makes you tell the tale of the earlier portion like it occurred during your previous life stage?  Seriously, it was THIS morning, yet it feels like it must have been when I was a mere nymph.

I won’t bore you with my metamorphosis fantasies since its not the change I long for so much anymore, but the time to drift away, asleep in a cocoon.  Dreamy.  No bills to worry over or spontaneously arise just as you thought you were getting ahead, can’t because you’re sacked out in the cocoon.  No frustrations about where you are in your life relative to where you think you should be, can’t ’cause, sigh, cocoon-town.  No fretting over how you said or what you said and who you said it to, yep, sailed off to cocoon-ville.

Dreams aside, for now I’m going to finish my slack jawed dullard day with a bit o’ television.  God bless America!

And we’re off!  Challenged.  Or at least with a challenge tucked in the back pocket of a dusty creative consciousness; it’s on. In an ode to my cooler older brother’s 365 photo blog, which features a cleverly captured image every (damn!) day of the year and being not only cooler, but the higher achieved over-achiever (damn!), this is round 2 of his spreading of year-round awesomeness (damn!).

To properly represent the gene pool, I vowed to write at some sort of regular interval within the next 365 days, however non-committal that vow may come across it is still a vow.  Hold tight to your seats, pull out your reading glasses and prepare to be amazed or lulled to sleep. To read.  About something.  About nothing.  Yes, nothing. Yes, everyday.  The everyday stuff that is the goodness of being a cognizant organism capable of oxygen exchange. Ideas, thoughts, musings on the everyday as was originally intended for this space slated to be filled with 365 days of life.

The journey begins…

Falling asleep had never seemed scary. Dreaming for hours about random, senseless bits of life had always been something to relish. That is, until it lasted too long. 32 hours to be exact. Never before had it seemed possible to finish a day, talking to friends, laughing, living, and then fall away. Asleep.

Falling asleep didn’t seem scary until I awoke and the world was split in two. Literally. When standing up straight was a challenge and it was difficult to determine whether I was awash in sleep, longing to return to it or if the longing for it was the only means to get me out of a strange reality; the fear seeped in.

Falling asleep never came with a warning label. Sleep was never deemed a dangerous entity. Until it’s not sleep, but referred to by many (except myself, at first) as a coma.

From the Greek, koma (κῶμα), meaning deep sleep, is a profound state of unconsciousness. Profound unconsciousness. Profound. Unconsciousness. Somehow I had fallen into a profound state of unconsciousness.

The moment the word slipped off my tongue, it became palpable.

A blood clot hit my brain, my thalamus to be exact, my sleep center, knocking me out. Literally. Completely unexpectedly.

Changing me.

Living on the edges of Montana towns, I’ve been gifted with birds.  For four years of my life I occupied an old, historic converted Ranger’s Station (to dash all notions of charm– it was pretty much a miniature single wide trailer) on a cowboy horse packer’s property that was propped-up amidst the shrub lands at the urban-wildland interface of Missoula, Mont.  It had it’s charm with a long dusty road entryway, a metal roof, old barn-wood framed windows.  It’s closet-sized kitchen, complete with the only closet in the house, made getting dressed while frying an egg and starting coffee in the morning easily done from the one stool and collapsible TV table you could squeeze in there.  It had a dorm-sized fridge, no freezer and a miniature stove and sink.  All 300 sq feet of it was more than enough for me and a pack of dogs, however.

Thanks to the shrubs, every Spring I was often one of the first to witness the annual bird migration– varied thrushes and white-crowned sparrows would spend a few days loitering, fattening up on my offerings of seed and suet before moving on to higher, more densely forested places.  Read the rest of this entry »

Disclaimer: Unfortunately, the original unedited version of this piece was lost.  Somewhere in the editing a little bit of voice got softened, some went mute. Tended grammar rings with a tone of sadness, for me anyway.

The American dream is alive and well in Missoula, Mont., sort of. Not long after arriving here in the late 1990s, I found myself in the same conversation about real estate, hearing the same words and sharing the same sentiment. “You can’t eat the landscape,” someone would say, and everyone within earshot would laugh at the cliché, though it would usually be followed by an uncomfortable silence. Here’s what wasn’t funny then or now: In a recent Missoulian article, local realtors tallied their statistics and calculated a whopping $206,850 median price for a house, but only a median income of $43,200. Read the rest of this entry »