Head Case (23 page)

Going to the grocery store is still my biggest hurdle. I try to go at off-hours when the store is the least crowded, and I remind myself to take my time, that no one cares how long it takes me to find the peanut butter. One afternoon while I'm running errands after work, the woman in front of me in line at the drugstore turns around to smile hesitantly at me, as if she wants to ask a question. I take my headphones off. “Are you from around here?” she asks. I smile and shake my head, the same answer that I give wherever I am.

She steps out of line to ask a clerk, I see the hand waving, hear her ask, “On the other side of the highway? Left? Are you sure?”

This will be my first full year of living independently without assistance from my parents, a boyfriend, or friends.

 

May 2013

Portland, Oregon

I'm back in town for a wedding. I make an appointment with Dr. Z, whom I haven't seen since I graduated from CalArts. His practice has grown to include another neurological chiropractor, a physical therapist, and an intern. The intern looks the same age that I was when I first saw Dr. Z, in his midtwenties. He sits in the back of the exam room and watches as Dr. Z runs me through some exercises.

“OK, walk down the hall and say the alphabet backward.”

Trying to do both at once, I accompany each letter with a stiff galloping step, and I get tripped up by the letter
G.

“OK, OK, back up. OK. This goes in your left hand now.”

He places a small hand massager, green polka-dotted and shaped like a toy frog, in my hand and turns it on; it trembles.

“Now start over. Walk down the hall, alphabet backward.”

I walk smoothly and recite the alphabet backward in its entirety.

“There you go. We just needed to juice up your brain a bit.”

The intern cracks, “You're going to have to keep that frog in your hand forever now.”

What does it mean for me to know that if you place a hand massager in my left hand I can walk down a hall and recite the alphabet backward at the same time, whereas I could not before? It means that there's still more to my brain than I understand, that I've witnessed undeniable change.

“We're going to have to get you down here more often,” he says. “You just have such a damn cool brain.”

In July, I'm back in my apartment in Santa Barbara when I break down crying after reading that Alan Turing, the engineer who Charlie told me killed himself by eating a chemical-laced apple, was posthumously pardoned by the UK parliament for the crime of homosexual activity. The feeling of being so deeply connected (to the passage of time, to Charlie, to powerful gestures that come too little too late) and so alone overwhelms me.

 

September 2013

Santa Barbara, California

A year and five months after we broke up, Charlie and I agree to meet over coffee in a park with a lake full of ducks and turtles, like the lake by his old apartment in Seattle. He tells me, “I know that I have a certain special insight into what's difficult for you,” and I wince. I tell him that even if he's right, I would like some space now to also be a person whom he just met; that I'll try to do the same for him. I also want to tell him that I haven't forgotten the tone in his voice that means that he's in pain and doesn't want to talk about it. We were never very good at figuring out the difference between having an insight and applying one.

In November, I start going back to the bar that I avoided for a year for fear of running into Charlie. I meet a graduate student in history who collects orchids. I bluff my way through a conversation about different varieties; the Latin names feel both ancient and familiar coming out of my mouth, like a prayer or a spell.
Phalaenopsis
,
Cymbidium
,
Dendrobium
. I give him my card and tell him that he should get in touch with me if he wants his students to receive extra credit for attending the lecture series at the humanities center.

The time that I begin to spend with the grad student contains some kind of nutrient that I didn't know I'd been starving for; still, I can't stand to put my lot in with his. We've both broken up long-term relationships around the same time, and both feel ambivalent about starting anything new; now that I've lived on my own in Santa Barbara for the past year, this common anxiety feels heightened for me. The list of people who weren't sure that I'd be able to live independently includes my parents, Charlie, my therapist, my neurologist. My freedom is hard won and always at risk of receding; anything that threatens my solitude feels as if it also threatens my independence. The more whole I begin to feel on my own, the more mistrustful I've become of any of the traditional promises about what makes someone feel complete, especially in relationships. Learning to value my independence was a painful lesson, one that I'm scared of forgetting and even more frightened of having to learn all over again.

On one night he spends at my place he wakes me at 3:00 a.m., screaming “OhGodPleaseNoHelpMePleaseNoGod!” at the top of his lungs. My gut instinct is to put my hand against his chest to feel for blood. I can make out that his hands are in the air, but it's too dark for me to tell if he's guarding his face or about to throw a punch. I cautiously place my hand on his chest and find no blood anywhere, so I grab his arms by the wrists and shake him. “Are you all right? Are you all right?” I yell over and over. I'm so scared that I've forgotten his name. I finally shake him awake, and he turns his back to me and says quietly to the wall, “No.”

I don't know if I should comfort him or leave him be. I honestly don't know if it's any of my business at all except that he happens to be in my bed. After watching someone whom I'm just starting to know and care for in so much pain, I feel terrified and helpless. I think that this must be how Charlie felt watching me, and I feel sick. At the time, I couldn't help any of it any more than if I had been asleep.

I know the shame and embarrassment of your wildest self witnessed by someone you care for, and after being woken up by someone else's nightmare, I understand more deeply how it feels to be on the other end of things—when your care can't dampen someone else's pain.

After spending a year living alone, I have finally learned how to read my own vulnerabilities and address them. The space has allowed me very slowly to find gentleness toward the intensity of my own feelings instead of trying to violently expel them from my body. During this year, I have untangled my desires and resentments from Charlie's, slowly extricating what he actually felt from what I wished he felt. In my time alone, I've read books and listened to music made by artists who also feel deeply, and they have made me feel less alone and helped me find the courage to risk really knowing someone again.

In the morning, I don't ask him what the dream was about. I'm not ready to know, and some dark and ugly-feeling part of me resents him for breaking our contract—for not being someone “easy to be with” as he had offered to be months earlier, an agreement that given enough time I wouldn't have been able to keep either. I wonder if anyone could, and for how long.

Instead, I tell him that I used to have a recurring dream about the apocalypse. In the dream I know that it is the apocalypse because fire is creeping up streets from the burning buildings on the horizon. The only way to escape my dream apocalypse is to drive out of the dream city, so I get into the driver's seat of a car and strap on the seat belt. The dream ends the same way, every time. I crash my car and die before I get a block down the street.

When she was little, my friend Solen used to have a terrifying recurring nightmare in which her only escape from torture was to conjure a tall building to jump off of. Now she's an architect.

*   *   *

Everyone has a labyrinthine brain with a Minotaur at the center: a memory, an illness, a heartache, a deep frustration. Shake hooves with your Minotaur; invite your Minotaur to coffee. Your Minotaur is lonely and hungry and thus, understandably, not in the best of moods. No one understands what it's like to be a Minotaur; this is why he is writing a memoir. He says
testimony
, he says
witness
, and he speaks of his responsibility to the Minotaur community. You are not sure that the world really needs another memoir by a mythological being, one more man-beast identity crisis to stack on the pile, but you try to be supportive because he is the only Minotaur you have. You've heard of and seen people who claim to have slain their Minotaurs with trips to rehab or years of therapy, and while you admire them, it's also still a little sad. Maybe because when people are defined so long by struggle and battle, it's tough to know who they are once they've won. Once you get to the center of a labyrinth, you still have to find your way back out. You can't see anyone from where you're standing, but still you hope that there's someone listening through the other paper cup at the end of your twine, waiting by the exit sign. You hope that someone wants to know what's been taking so long. “Why the holdup?” You hope at least that someone noticed that you were gone.

The kicker here is that the person at the other end of the labyrinth, the person who you hope is waiting for you, cannot help you through. That person cannot guide you, tell you “No, your
other
left.” All that the person at the end has signed up for is to wait for you; all that you can promise is to move forward. Waiting is enough; moving forward is enough.

Isn't what we all want, and what we're all terrified of, is for someone to see us for our truest selves? As someone who relies on others, I have a physiological stake in empathy, and still I have to work hard to find it in myself for the same people whom I rely on. It's so hard to remember that while my perception is unique, my pain is not. In therapy, in relationships, in my writing, I've been looking for a map out of the pain of being human, but the word
atlas
means “to endure.” No one is born with a map of life in hand. Just when we think that we know where we're headed, that's when the real trouble starts; the unforeseen circumstances, the self-sabotaging, the oasis on the horizon that melts into a mirage. The brain is often an unreliable narrator. It tells you go left, go right, trust this person, don't trust that one, you are weak, you are strong. You alone decide when to listen.

I have a friend whose therapist taught him to force himself out of his overwhelming thoughts and back into the present by talking to himself in his car, on the way to work. “This is me now. This is me talking. This is the sound of my voice.” I'm already overanalyzing his strategy as he tells it to me. How can the sound of my voice anchor me in time? Once it leaves my body, pushed by my breath past the tongue, the teeth, I'm already trailing behind it.

I am the same as before I knew the truth about my brain, and I'll never be that person again; my diagnosis is both an ending and a beginning. I still type “Developmental Gerstmann's Syndrome” or “right parietal atrophy” into a search engine sometimes, to confirm my symptoms to myself—to be sure that I'm not making all of this up.

This is me now. This is the sound of my voice.

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My deepest gratitude to:

Fress Club: Mark, Lesley, Carly, and Marni Cohen.

The Diamond Family: Ron, Linda, Jake, and Danielle.

Henry Dunow and Wendy Owen, Caroline Zancan and everyone at Henry Holt, Kristy Rippee, Karl and Lenora Yerkes, Nora Gedgaudas, Dr. Michael Mega, Dr. Glen Zielinski, Dr. V. S. Ramachandran, Jon Wagner and the members of my CalArts thesis class, David L. Ulin, Maggie Nelson, Brighde Mullins, Leslie Brody, Joy Manesiotis, Bill McDonald, the Johnston Center for Integrative Studies, UCSB's Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, and the Corporation of Yaddo.

In memory of Connie Bowsher, the first teacher to have faith in me.

 

About the Author

C
OLE
C
OHEN
holds an MFA in creative writing and critical studies from California Institute of the Arts. She was a finalist for the Bakeless Prize and the Association of Writers & Writing Programs prize in nonfiction. She currently lives in Santa Barbara, California, where she works at the University of California Santa Barbara's Interdisciplinary Humanities Center. You can sign up for email updates
here
.