Those that know me, or follow me on social media, may have heard that I’ve had a bumpy few weeks. There seems to be a lot of change in my life at the moment – some welcome, some wary. I’m officially an empty-nester (which I have to admit, feels worse than I thought it would); other significant changes are swirling inside me; and I also had the unfortunate luck to faint at work – leading to a minorly dramatic cut to the head that resulted in a temporary shiner and a permanent dent in my forehead/pride. Life just feels strange right now.
It’s been hard to write. It’s been hard to do much but sit and look out the window. But hey. Get in line, right? Maybe it is COVID fatigue. Maybe it is latent fury at human ignorance across so so many issues. Maybe it is my deep despondency about the lack of civility in our present day world. Maybe it is my not-so-latent fury at the ongoing assault against women. Maybe I just need a drink.
I wasn’t sure how, or if, to write about my faint. In the days that followed I wrote some pithy haiku and was fascinated to see the progress of my perfectly placed black eye. But inside I was feeling as shook up as the new floaters I seem to have in my eyes. I do feel somewhat self-conscious to be exposing myself in this way, and worry that my current angst-ridden outpourings might be getting a little tiresome for those that take the time to read them – kind of like those Instagram poets you might follow that start to sound like Hallmark cards after a few weeks. The incident itself was perhaps an innocent perfect storm of circumstances, but led by the reality that my body is changing. I am perimenopausal – a life stage most know little about and yet half the world goes through. It feels like an intensely vulnerable time. Things that used to be a certain way aren’t anymore, which makes you feel like you can’t trust your own body and the new things that you have to deal with seem to be, universally, shitty. But, I’ve decided the only thing I can change is my outlook so I’m searching for the power to be found in this vulnerability. I’m reaching for a new reality that I can write to suit the world I want to live in. A world that I can create. Because when you’re on the floor, there really is only one direction to go.
View from the floor
First, static emerges
From the dark
A radio station stuck between signals
Popping…fritzing…buzzing
Hail on a tin roof
Eventually patterns form
Ringing shapes become garbled voices
A heated debate in unknowable words
The voices aren’t familiar but I want to tell them to relax, to stop shouting
I blink to push the sound down and realize that my eyelids open instead
Thick cobwebs obscure my view
But my view to what?
White blobs and a white line all shrouded in gauze
Confusion edged with perplexion
I don’t understand what my eyes are showing me
My sightline doesn’t compute with anything in my brain’s database
So I tell myself to close my eyes and open them again
You know… cycle the power
But the image stays the same – white on white on white
I puzzle this
Floating above a void
If my eyes aren’t aiding me, perhaps my other senses will
Because I can clearly feel the warm sensation of something dripping from my forehead
Wait.
Why is there something dripping from my forehead?
I scrape my eyes away from the gauzy labyrinth to look to my left instead
Inches away I see
Vivid red droplets splashing down onto white
Drip…drip…drip
Ahh, I see. It’s blood
It’s blood dripping from me
I get it now, the puzzle unlocked but no prize in sight
Here I am. On the floor
Poetic irony humbling me yet again
Shakespearean fuckery some might say
The question of course, is
How long have I been here?
On the floor
