The sky is bleeding rain. I am on 42nd Street and I cannot tell if I am wet or just cold. The sun is MIA.
Across from me is this mime making O shapes with his face, his hands flat against an invisible wall. The KFC bucket near his feet is full of coins (and Chuck E. Cheese coins). I start to wonder who the bucket actually belongs to when the mime’s movements become anxious, uncertain, non-mime-like, and his eyes open very large so that the white and red and sickly yellow is apparent to the known, and his hands begin to claw at the impossibly hard wall of air, claw and scratch, until the mime begins crying, trapped in walls no one else can see.
This once paintless baby having a panic attack, trapped, squashed, etc..,. inspires in me a nameless dread that I understand to mean that I can absolutely not continue with the way I am going in life.
Squeezing my blood bag, I feel unusually jobless and futile. Everything I’ve never paid attention to is revealed; the heavy foot of all my excuses and thought pain felt atop my life.
I go quickly home to meditate, a practice I haven’t engaged in for three years, and first try mindfulness. I count my inhale-exhales to ten, then just my exhales, then I just focus, and finally, effortlessly, really, I visualize myself in an elevator riding up, where on every floor a letter passes, and I remember them all which is surprising because my memory is not good. S-I-L-T.
I try to understand this definite X-ray of my mind, and am almost at the grasp of revelation when a drive-by-memory of my father at dinner plays without my consent, breaking doctor patient confidentiality over turkey in an island of my childhood, his accent French even though he never spoke French, poking my blood bag to get my attention, my father bending down, turning air into breath, forcing his voice into my ears: “Un-possible.”
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As a child, I was diagnosed with a condition that left me with this inexplicably un-pluggable hole in and around my pelvis, where blood escapes from skin in invisibly small drops. And so as not to drip feed the ground, I have a bag stitched into my side, which I bleed out into very slowly. The condition has a one hundred percent fatality rate, taking up to eighty or seventy years for a patient to finish bleeding out.
And with the image of the mime trapped, probably forever, the weight of my condition upsets a riot of feelings. My memories seem to breathe again, the past combing over my mind; the sensation of crushing ecstasy on grandma’s glass table, the naked image of my father stepping out of an impossibly short shower, the warm cave of pleasure I felt when I lost my virginity and the confusion after when I realized I hadn’t found what I was looking for, in fact that it, was like a beachball moving away from me in an infinitely long pool. It all rains down in sparks.
Why is it that I’m sitting on a lawn chair in my apartment and not sculpting myself into something that matters? It doesn’t make sense, maybe it’s all that alcohol I poured on my brain. And suddenly, like in a bad movie, I’m outside and walking towards 42nd Street, negotiating terms with my own existence, but when I get to the corner on Time Square the mime is nowhere to be found, MIA, and in his place is this young woman singing Losing My Religion.
My organs turn into clouds. A cape of fear flaps loudly in my ear as I rush home, my blood bag nearly half full. I need to scoop it back into me, get the blood somehow back into my envelope of flesh, but the bag can’t break, no matter how many razors I try on its plastic.
In my apartment again I realize that I’m on a one-way ticket to the future.
I see my father in the audience of a play I performed in High school. I want to stop and tell him he was right, but he wouldn’t know what I was talking about; he never said anything. And that’s gone too. And the trip in Italy I spent with my cousin–gone. It’s simply not fair; all of my memories are going to be erased, novel intimate feelings that couldn’t possibly be described in words turned into energy that does not know it is energy; a library of feelings forgotten by existence, never truly felt again, like a museum of paintings destroyed, always. Playing with my blood bag, hugging it, fingering the invincible plastic, I get its shape to be spherical in my lap. A geometry of meaning.