Hummingbird

I have so much free time on my hands now that I find myself repeatedly walking in circles around my house. For no other reason but to stop here and there, with the intention of crossing something off my mental list. I’ll even walk from the kitchen to the master bathroom to the office to the kitchen to the master bathroom to the kitchen three times before I realize I’ve made the circuit three times, because I have the Time, with a capital “T.”

There was that soap I wanted to toss from the shower and replace with the rose-scented one Gunnar just brought home for me from Europe, made in Germany. Walk to the bathroom, toss the soap, walk to the closet by the kitchen, grab the rose scented soap, walk back to the bathroom, put the rose scented soap in the shower, walk back to the kitchen. Pick up and peer at, my phone. Replace it back on the charger. Walk back into the hall, stare at the same cupboard I retrieved the rose-scented soap from. Wasn’t there something else I needed from that cupboard? I open the door in it where all the medicine, natural remedies, vitamins, sunscreen, and lotions are stored. I peer at the miscellany. I pick up a bottle, then two and three, and rearrange them, tallest at the back, squattest at the front, labels out. I choose one I think I should have in the master bathroom. I walk back to the bathroom. And so on.

                This month we chose to embark upon a “Sober October,” for the days leading up to our vacation in Greece. We started on October third, because on October second, we had planned a steak dinner out with Jay’s parents, and two of our children, Cole and Camille. It was at our favorite steak house, and we were unwilling to change the narrative of martinis with the appetizers, and cremini mushrooms and steamed spinach with melted butter, and garlic mashed potatoes that rested hot and pungent on your tongue, washed down with the slightly chewy bite of a solid Italian Barolo.

                Several days before that, the Pain (in my knee) had only just ended, and I had not consumed alcohol for two nights (when we are drinking, we are drinking nightly) as a prerequisite for a DUTCH test my naturopath had suggested I take for the second time in three years. DUTCH stands for “Dried Urine Test for Comprehensive Hormones” and interprets dried samples of your urine which you collect on five different paper strips throughout the course of a day and evening, and specified intervals between meals and liquids, air-dried and mailed off to a lab. The lab then returns a multi-paged report of graphs and summaries which provides a cryptic map to your hormones only your naturopath can decipher. It takes an intimate look at your testosterone, progesterone, cortisol levels, and DHEA amongst other hormones, and how they are behaving and whether they are low or high or rising or dropping at the wrong time of day and how this whirlpool of hormones both separately and collectively impact all sorts of things about your physiology such as your sex drive, your sleep cycles, your energy levels, your brain clarity, the amount of coffee you consume and sugar you crave (I gather) and your body’s inflammation. Inflammation being the buzz word of my middle-aged generation, fraught with autoimmune disorders and PTSD that led to autoimmune disorders, of the fact we didn’t play enough in the dirt as children or eat enough canned vegetables. From rusty cans.

                This Sober October, and this month of Pain and this month of Prednisone and this month of preparing for a trip to Greece, and this month of eating cookies and green leaves turning leather brown and mustard yellow and winds blowing sideways and rain pummeling our rooftops both here and at the coast, has been so outside my experience in my own body, my own life from the past twenty-five years that I am both dumfounded and bedazzled. The boredom (the pacing, the long days of steady energy from six in the morning until midnight, the inability to wind down enough to drift willingly off to bed) is the only challenge I face in each segment of twenty-fours, as in truth, each day blends seamlessly into the next like a long, sunny summer of childhood spent chasing butterflies in a meadow. Every other part of it akin to waking from the most fathomless sleep of my life. I have emerged from a deep, dark, chilly cave, where water drips from the walls and creepy moans emit from hollows beneath the earth. I look in the bathroom mirror each morning and just feel happy, as if the definition has always eluded me. A blue and black butterfly touching my fingertips with its wings and then disappearing.

I am happy all over. With my face, my skin, the way each of my separate limbs moves into clothing, across a floor, into a chair. I eat whatever I want, and what I want seems like enough. Words that always came to me before, shortly after putting anything into my stomach, no longer have a place in my head. I am not bloated, constipated, fat, or sleepy. My eyes are bright, my nostrils clear. I can’t remember the last time I needed eye drops or blew my nose.

                The alarm goes off and I am already awake. I wash my face and look at myself and the day feels three hours in – I am light as a bird, eating seeds left on a windowsill. Coffee is not the first thing I think of, even though of course I have prepared it the night before, and next to the pour-over pot, I have lined up all my daily herbs and vitamins in small dishes the size of my palm. My brain fires like so many fingers snapping in unison, instead of my prior sluggish morning brain, thick with cobwebs, desperate to catch up with fluids and fats to arrive at a moment of clarity, sometime before noon.

                I have practiced the sober life before. I went one hundred days without a drink, two years ago. Jay and I have completed at least eight or nine Whole30’s™ (thirty days of a cave dweller diet, which also means no alcohol). But never did I have the chemical cocktail of this month, the combination of   unrelenting days of pain, followed by pharmacological interventions that spun me up like a superpower into the heavens, combined with the absence of alcohol. Alcohol which is a nightly escape from the boredom I feel in this season of my life.

                This though, this magic potion, has changed everything, and I never ever want it to end. I want to bottle it, keep it close, never let it dissipate. I try not to think about it ending because that would ruin it. Burst the balloons under my armpits. I am confident! I have accomplished everything because there is nothing left to do! My sense of taking care of all things there are to take care of, is profound. And what quickly follows that thought is that I am not doing enough! Why else am I wandering in circles in my own house? I could bake a carrot cake for Jay. Check. I could run to the pharmacy and peruse eye creams, power bars and nail files, all in travel size so I can cross them off my packing list for Greece and practice putting them in the nooks and crannies of my suitcase in between my shorts and bathing suit and travel yoga mat. Check. I could take an Epsom salt bath, just to feel the soft water lapping my skin. Check. I could start our fourth puzzle of the month – I could just sort the pieces. Check. I could pour myself yet another sparkling water, tea, ice water, and drop in an electrolyte for good measure. Check.

  I am so thirsty. More than usual. Thirsty and drinking and peeing on a rotation, every hour or so as if prompted by a bedside nurse. I am parched. Our ice cube maker stopped working over the summer, so I ordered four ice cube trays which I refill two or three times a day. The ritual of emptying and filling the trays makes me hum. I adjust the faucet to run gently into the neon green molds.

                I read about a challenge to write a 50,000-word novel in the month of November. I think if I did sober November, I could achieve this. I could finish the novel I am working on, but that is considered cheating on this challenge. The first rule is to something new. I am considering this. Is there a book I’d like to write in the month of November? I think about the seven books I’ve read so far in October. One of them I fell in love with and had to put it down at night so I could savor what I read and have something to read the next night. I looked forward to seeing it all day, like a lover whose touch I was still craving long after they had left the room. I was disappointed when I finished reading, because some insane part of me believed it was possible I never would.

                I am using rooms in my house I rarely venture into. Namely, my living room but also the guest rooms and the guest bath. I turned over the “boys” room from Cole to Gunnar, running the attachment wand from the vacuum cleaner into the narrow dusty corners, smoothing creases from newly washed sheets. I am also spending time in closets I haven’t looked in since stuffing things I never really needed into them when we moved into Hawthorne house two and a half years ago. I spent thirty minutes breaking down boxes in the garage and organizing the recycling bins. I rearranged the pantry and noticed items I had previously held myself back from buying (I was allergic, or too many calories or preservatives or what would I cook with legumes) winking at me from the shelves. Kidney beans. Gluten free Oreos. Corn nuts. Pasta. I laugh at myself. The clock in the kitchen ticks. Has it always done that? The refrigerator hums.

Jay selects music on the iPad pre-dinner and during dinner. It is always too loud, too tinny, too bizarre, or too repetitive. I turn it down or turn it off. I turn on the television. The pandemic has drifted over us like snow, and we nestle in to watch a variety of series, mostly crime related. Before, we watched only 60 Minutes at 7pm on Sundays, or the occasional movie on Netflix, if bored enough. Perusing the menu used to take more effort than I had patience for, as I sipped my second martini. Now I go online and search lists such as “Best Netflix Series of 2021” and “thirty movies for a fall evening”.

                I plan dinner at 6:30am, as I stand in the kitchen waiting for the coffee to brew. Often, I even prep it. At minimum, I put all the ingredients on the counter that do not require refrigeration, and I print out the recipe and place it by the block of knives. When we eat, we do not linger, there doesn’t seem to be much to say that we haven’t already shared with each other throughout the day, as we bump into each other in the kitchen, or I step into Jay’s office to grab something off the printer. When the mail carrier comes, it’s an event, and if Jay has overlooked it or is in a meeting, I gleefully slip on my shoes and walk out to retrieve it. The sky and the outside feel very close, like the atmosphere has shrunk around me, around the bubble of our home, and the meanderings inside.

                I feel no sadness, no anger, no indifference. I feel alive. I feel as if I am constantly moving forward, unshackled, free to choose my hours, and what I do with them. My brain does not turn off; it is a hot iron full of steam. This brain of mine is pulsating like a disco ball, and I never want it to stop spinning, I want to dance under it like a teenager. But I must find a way to turn it off at night, so that I can sleep. I notice the dark circles under my eyes, despite all these endorphins, despite all this energy, despite all this burgeoning self-love, and I don’t want to lose purchase, I don’t want to crumple when the live wire is cut. I glance at the outlines of myself in my full-length mirror, and there is an aura glowing peach and gold, a light I cannot lose my grip on, a light I refuse to have, fade out.