Laid low yet again by a throat infection gone wild (streptococcus with a nasty body rash, also known as Scarlet Fever), I have been out sick for over three weeks, and am still in danger of losing my voice whenever I talk for more than thirty minutes. I’m on my second round of antibiotics now – Cephalexin, which has a bit of a broader reach, supposedly, than penicillin – and am desperate to be well. This has all been very, very bad for my ability to earn my keep as a telephone solicitor.
The last time I lost my voice, I was itching to say something to Ted that I just couldn’t spit out. This year, not only did I have a major throat infection, I became literally itchy – all over. Coincidence? You know I doubt it.
**
You’d think that with all this time on my hands I’d be plowing through the Matador program at hyperspeed. Not so. I’ve found myself blocked and stymied so often, I’ve only just completed the assignments of the first week — in one month. Granted, Week One is a multi-part assignment that includes setting up a blog and posting three different posts, one of which requires more than cursory research. Who completes these fool things in a damn week? Already I’m feeling inferior to my fellow students, mainly energetic and tech-savvy young things who have Twitter feeds and Tumblr accounts and who have backpacked through the Andes with naught but a burro and a tent.
All of my insecurities, all of my violent envy and feelings of rivalry toward other writers have come surging back, and the World Wide Web seems to me like a river choked with excess content, like floating garbage, that no one will ever read. Who needs more word pollution? Why do this? My voice is going to be drowned out by the deafening cacophony of more aggressive (if not more talented) voices. What makes me think I have what it takes to succeed in this clogged, competitive, relentlessly fast wired world?
As a quieter counterpoint, I hear Jonathan Goldman’s voice again, his raspy, ebullient baritone, good-naturedly attempting to calm my agitated mind. Long before the dawn of the Internet, I voiced these tortured thoughts to Jon, who was a highly talented writer in his own right. He, however, didn’t see the ever-increasing output of innumerable wannabe writers as a noxious glut any more than he envisioned the market as a single, crowded stage where competition was fierce for scarce attention and acclaim. “There’s room for everybody,” he insisted. He didn’t seem to view his own success as necessarily someone else’s failure, or vice versa. He believed abundant opportunities existed for a multiplicity of unique voices.
Jon’s perspective stopped me in my tracks. I’d never heard anyone frame things in such an expansive, non-competitive way before. (I was a senior in high school.) For me, fighting for scarce resources had always been a way of life.
**
But even assuming, like Jon, that there’s “room” for me, there’s still the practical problem of travel. Beyond the most obvious question – how does one make money doing travel writing when one has no money to travel in the first place? – there’s the lead boot of my weak immune system, of which I’ve been so thoroughly reminded. I was on a long weekend, visiting my best friend from college on the East Coast for a long overdue vacation, when I came down with the fever of 102 that began this nasty business. I did drink a lot of alcohol, and combined the drinking with some extreme temperature changes (getting in and out of an outdoor hot tub in winter weather)…but alcohol and extreme temperature changes are par for the course in a lot of travel situations.
At home, I can carefully control my diet and my environment, taking a daily regimen of supplements and other preventative foodstuffs and staying out of extreme temperatures. On the road, that amount of control can go out the window — even in-country, and among people who know me. (Almost every time I go back East to visit family I get sick…although that may be another story.)
In my house, growing up, it was as rare for my mother to be completely well as it was for my father to miss a day of school. Unfortunately, I inherited more of her immune system than his. Since early childhood, I’ve been plagued with skin problems and urinary tract disorders and sinusitis and multiple pneumonias and snail-slow recoveries from the most ridiculously common ailments. Once I was even tentatively diagnosed with fibromyalgia by a clinic specializing in autoimmune diseases. I like to ignore these facts, and pretend that I’m completely normal, even if I have to slather myself with cortisone cream every morning or find a restroom once an hour. (Maybe I can turn that into a selling point: travel for people with overactive bladders.) But I fear my less-than-robust health may be a liability when it comes to my dreams.
**
These are the some of the things one thinks about when one is home sick and has nothing to do but think.
One may also think about how one is alone, and how there is nobody, really, whose job it is to look after one.
Well, if you’re me, that is. I’ve leaned pretty heavily, too heavily, perhaps, on Greg, who has driven me to the hospital, the enrollment clinic, the Japanese noodle house, and the grocery store (just to name a few), bailed me out and bought me lunch, and who is neither my brother nor my boyfriend. It’s gotten to the point where I don’t dare ask him for one more thing for fear of becoming a bona fide pain in the ass. I asked a girl friend to take me to the enrollment clinic one morning, but she isn’t the sort of friend I’d ask a favor more than once.
So then I venture out on foot or by bus or bike, in an effort not to ask for any more favors, and wind up making myself sicker again.
When well, you see, I can be independent and get around on my own, without bothering anyone; made dependent, I’m afraid I’ll spend the last of my friends’ goodwill. In these sorts of situations of weakness and vulnerability, it’s usually one’s “flesh and blood,” or one’s significant other, that steps in to help. Obviously, I have neither. My mum may fuss about my ailments from two thousand miles away, but there’s a very good reason I vowed never to depend upon my kin again. So I don’t. And despite my best intentions and efforts of the past couple of years, I’m still as partner-less as ever.
Being ill can really underscore one’s existing loneliness.
**
In those wretched moments when you feel as if you’ll never be well again, when you start to imagine that the authorities will find your lifeless body in your bed three days from now, you also begin to think of everything you haven’t done. When you’re healthy, you act as if you have all the time in the world, as if you’ll live forever, which is an illusion. Illness strips away illusions and makes you revisit your priorities.
Which brings me back to the recurrent location of my dis-ease. Is it wholly unreasonable to relate persistent throat and voice issues with the inability to speak one’s truth?
**
One day, a few weeks ago, I lost the “battle.” The battle my kinfolk would no doubt characterize as being against Satan. One Sunday morning at the beginning of January, I stopped waging my moral struggle entirely.
I was in the sunny front room at work with Dan and our friend Eric, who can get some hilarious banter going with Dan when you put them together. They had been making me laugh helplessly to the point of tears, but when Eric took a call, the talk turned more serious, and I started telling Dan about Matador.
I don’t know what it was…the way he listened to me so attentively, or the look in his eyes, those shining eyes so absolutely full of Dan, but all at once something just gave way inside of me. If the feeling had been a thought, it might have been something like: Fuck it. I surrender. You win. Even if there’s absolutely nothing in it for me, I love you, Dan, because you deserve it. Because I can’t help it.
There wasn’t any pain, not at that moment, anyway, only a sort of inarticulate joy, and the relief that comes at the end of a long, strenuous, futile effort. I relaxed and enjoyed the Dan and Eric morning show until Dan left at noon.
Another day soon after, he was sitting next to me in a sun-drenched cubicle during a client briefing. It was warm, and close beside me my lovely friend stretched out his big body drowsily in his chair, his head by my shoulder. The light, even in that relatively dull environment, was exultant, beaming off every surface (cup, keyboard, cubicle wall) as if in praise or celebration…and suddenly I felt as if I were in sunny, magical Italy again, not some godforsaken call center. Not a thing was missing; I was where I belonged, right now, nowhere but here, in this light, beside this dear, beloved man, my friend. All questions of should or shouldn’t were meaningless. Life was beautiful, rich, and whole. I could scarcely draw a breath, fearing I’d disturb that moment of perfectly crystallized happiness. I hoped the briefing would go on indefinitely.
**
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn’t make any sense.
- Rumi
Rumi loved another man in a time when loving another man that much was punishable by death. It’s still that way under fundamentalist Islam. Whatever else anyone wants to say about me – however they want to judge me – I’m unlikely to get executed for my propensities. They don’t stone adulterers anymore, either; otherwise most of Congress would be in trouble.
**
I am wondering what I’ll find when I return. Perhaps my absence has made the effects of my presence fade. Perhaps my friend will have made new friends; the company has a constantly revolving door, with new trainees arriving every week. Will he even still be there? The only constant is change, after all, and I’ve certainly made the mistake of overestimating my significance to other people, particularly men.
All of these ponderings may be moot. If, after my month-long absence, Dan keeps more of a distance from here on out, it may mean that our moment has passed. Such moments pass in all kinds of relationships, not infrequently those at work. Every one has a greater or lesser lifespan. Today’s confidante can become tomorrow’s water cooler acquaintance. More rarely, that person can become your friend for life.
For the umpteenth time, I never wanted to bark up the wrong tree. I don’t want to complicate Dan’s life or make him unhappy, or make his wife unhappy. At the same time, in some strange way, I believe that the words stuck in my throat are less ambiguous and less harmful now than they may have been before. Without the moral judgment, without the teeth-clenching self-control (that pushes Dan out of my conscious mind and so vividly into my dreams), they don’t get so mixed up with ancient resentments and injuries having to do with my deserving and/or unworthiness. So fucking what if I love Dan? Who’s gonna tell me I can’t?
**
Greg told me about a friend who divorced his wife amicably simply because she wanted to move somewhere else and pursue a life he couldn’t envision as being his. “Who was I to hold her back?” he explained to Greg. I’ve encountered this generous attitude elsewhere, but it’s more European than American, more like the unapologetically secular French with their more flexible (to put it diplomatically) approach to commitment than our Judeo-Christian tradition, which tends to view spouses as personal property.
It’s a stance I’ve had to embrace more of necessity than by choice, relinquishing loved ones who had other ideas. Of course I hadn’t gotten a promise to stay from any of them. But what if we were all that generous with each other? Can you imagine? Not only could I accept (if not be thrilled about) Dan saying I like you a lot, but I love my wife, she’s the one for me…but Mai could also accept (if not be thrilled about) Dan saying I’ve fallen in love with someone else, and I want to be with her.
I can just hear my mother having paroxysms as I write. O the selfishness! O the worldly permissiveness! In my comments section last time, I posted a link to a fundie article on “Biblical marriage” asserting that “there is no right person,” which was shared on Facebook by (of all people) my sister-in-law. Interestingly enough, right above that in my feed was the “testimony” (ironically named) from exchristian.net by a woman who had tried to be a Good Christian Wife by rejecting the agnostic she loved, and marrying a Good Christian Man. Twenty-five years later, she would leave the Bible-believing abuser and be reunited with her godless first love – with whom she has been happy ever since. So much for “Biblical marriage” and “no right person.” I don’t know how people continue to live within the born-again bubble, you have to filter so much conflicting information out.
Strictly speaking, by the way, “Biblical marriage” would mean that Dan would be perfectly justified in taking me as a second wife or a concubine, in the tradition of Abraham. Or Solomon. Or countless other wealthy patriarchs. But that’s beside the point.
**
My aforementioned friend on the East Coast, who is in the middle of a divorce, and has found her soul mate at last in a much older man who was just getting separated when they met, had this to say: “Can you continue to just be, like that, with him, in the moment?”
Maybe that’s all there is to be done. I’m not convinced, however, that my voice will come back if I don’t speak the words that have been sticking in my throat. I’ve swallowed an awful lot of them in the course of a lifetime. If this godawful antibiotic-resistant bacteria were going to kill me either way, I wouldn’t want anything important to be left unsaid. I’ve done more damage with silence than with words anyhow.
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