10 January 2001 ~ Caffeine overdose and the Big Thing...

"I am afraid," I read.

My period began at lunch today, cramps and stickiness and all other unpleasant aspects of womanhood, all bundled neatly into one grotesque-feeling body. It never fails to amaze me that my body is capable of having such weird things happen to it. I'm going to be sixty-seven and still pondering the mysteries of menstruation. In ways, I suppose I'm still in awe of it, despite nearly seven years of having gone through it, month after month. In ways too, it scares the shit out of me. One minute, I'm drinking my latté and chatting merrily with friends, and the next minute, I have to excuse myself, to run away and hide, curl up in the fetal position (the fetal position! the menstruation signifies there is no pre-fetus within me, and so I, the woman on the outside, become like one?!), clutch my abdomen and sort of whimper until the blubbery, watery, wiggly pain subsides, or until I fall asleep.

It's terrifying. I never know how incapacitated I might become, and when it will strike. I can discover the bleeding, feel a mild, pinchy, GYN-exam-like cramping, and think, "aw fuck, it's just my period," and do nothing about it, and half an hour later, be incoherent, writhing, and on the verge of passing out. My fingers go numb, my face becomes so pale that strangers become afraid and either pass by me as quickly as possible, or rush to my assistance, sit me down and ask if I'm okay. Then, I take something --Tylenol if I can find it, ibuprofen if I can't -- and fall into the nearest comfortable bed, and shake until I'm asleep. Then I sleep badly, with weird dreams and shaky, hot feelings, and a lot of sweat and thirst and feverishness. I wake up feeling a little bit removed from the world. My fingers aren't quite attached to my hands, I'm still a little sleepy, still half-unconscious.

So, it's fair to say it scares me. My own body's so-called natural processes scare me, make me aware of my own weaknesses, give me a sense of what it would be like to be paralyzed.

About a year ago, a doctor prescribed something for me: little reddish things that subdue the pain, make me forget the trauma in my womb and all around it. They don't take away the fatigue, though, and I usually end up sicker than a dog within the next day or two: my stomach squishes around and my throat closes and I can't eat for two or three days, and end up taking more pills to combat THAT. In all, it's best to just take Tylenol.

I couldn't find Tylenol today, but it was imperative that I take SOMETHING before the pain could hit, so I grabbed the closest thing I could find: a packet of Midol. I took both capsules, not bothering to read the directions until afterwards, when I saw that the caffeine content is pretty high.

Ladies and gentlemen, I will inform you of a small secret: I am allergic to caffeine. My body cannot handle it. When I write, "I've had too much coffee," it means I've had half a cup of decaf. When I say I'm hyper from all the caffeine, it means I drank a cup of very-watery black tea, which has about half the caffeine content of a cup of coffee. Too much, ie, two or three cups, and I can no longer function. I tend to exaggerate the amount of caffeine I take in, because I'd be laughed at if I admitted that half a cup of coffee knocks me on my ass silly. I break out in a sweat, I start to panic, I start to breath funny and believe I'm going to die. Gahd-for-freaking-bid I ever get myself hooked on speed. Anyway, it's apparently an inherited trait, as my mother can't even have chocolate without bugging out, and my grandmother gets migraines and stomachaches at the mere mention of caffeine. So, I indulge sometimes, but the idea of actually taking a caffeine pill is a pretty bad thing for me. My mother told me a horror story about when she was a teenager and accidentally overdosed on Midol -- Midol! -- and of the hallucinations she had. But it was a little too late to worry about it, so I went out to the used bookstore, to the grocery store and to Norman's apartment, where, shaky and a little bug-eyed and crampy, I fell asleep immediately.

I heard him leave to play his guitar at Lost Dog. I heard his goodbye and heard the door slam, but I couldn't force my eyes open, or force my vocal cords to make any sounds other than "nnnnh." I slept awhile longer, and woke up at the sound of the door slamming again. Norman had come back to drop his guitar off, and had gone out again. Pissed off that I'd been sleeping at such a weird hour, that I hadn't gone to Lost Dog, hadn't gotten to watch Norman play, I got up, stomped to the bathroom, picked up the book that I was reading, and stomped back to bed, to clear my mind a little bit, wake myself up and bring myself back to the real world a bit.

I'm reading "The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge," by Rainer Maria Rilke. Don't ask me to pronounce those names with any semblance of a correct accent. Norman's made a wonderful habit out of making sure I'm never without something new and interesting to read. I devour the books off his shelf like I devour orange juice and David Lynch films. I admit, I'm usually too intimidated to go to libraries and just PICK something. For being an ex-writing-student, I'm terribly ignorant about literary names, and while I love good books, I don't know how to find them; it's much easier and much more motivating to have someone else do that part for me, particularly when it's someone who knows me fairly well, AND has a pretty solid knowledge of an awful lot of books. For the record, I like most of Norman's movies, too.

So I've been reading this book. It's very hard to follow, not like anything I've ever read before, unless you count the one or two poems I stumbled through by Sylvia Plath, which didn't make much sense to me either. Usually, I haven't got the patience for confusing, poetic, babbly writing; not that it isn't good -- perhaps it is -- but I simply don't have the patience for it. For some reason, I've plugged away at this book, though, have been reading a few paragraphs before bed every night. Then I read the same paragraphs over a few more times, feeling like I'm STILL missing something. In trying to figure out what the hell is going on, I fall asleep, the dreamy words kind of melting away. I think if you could hold the words of this book in your hands, they'd slip away anyway, just as if you were to pour a can of condensed milk into your palms. I imagine the words are sort of cream-colored and thick, but still lacking something that is just beyond my grasp.

I'm on page 60 now. It's marked by Brian's Christmas card, with its Seattle postmark over a stamp of the Eagle Nebula. Brian's card is friendly and cute and real, and very... substantial. "The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge" is none of those things...

So I woke up from my nap, realized for sure that Norman had come and gone only a few seconds earlier, and decided to read until he came back, or until something happened, or until I fell asleep again.

(I may remind you that, even now, my hands are numb, my eyes don't seem connected to their sockets, and I'm sweating like it's 90 degrees out, even though I'm freezing. Some of it is the pills, some of it is my stupid period. Whatever it is, though, I'm just not quite feeling right.)

So I read. I began here:

"For awhile yet I can write all this down and express it. But there will come a day when my hand will be far from me, and when I bid it write, it will write words I do not mean..."

How freaky. How unnerving and disconcerting. Made me feel like grinding my teeth, a habit I've never had. Felt like fingernails on a chalkboard; felt like stepping on something squishy and having it tickle the entire sole of your foot until you cringe.

There will come a day when my hand will be far from me.

What a horrible thought. What a horrible feeling in my body and my mind. I remembered just a week or two ago when I had that fever, when I had to stop smoking for a few days, and the combined insults of illness and withdrawal tore my mind into such unmanageable pieces that I could barely function, couldn't even focus on making love without strange images popping up in my mind: a narcotic series of numbers and colors, people's voices, a "28" in brown type on a rectangle, a "4" floating through the air, the word "orgasm" flashing and then disappearing, and finally a large cream-colored jolly-looking "3" painted on an enormous baby-blue cylinder. It seemed like the "3" was smiling, or laughing. Three is kind of a happy-looking number. I couldn't will the weird thoughts to stop no matter what I did, couldn't even bring myself back to reality enough to have sex without mild hallucinations, for gahd's sake. It was a lot like how I imagine a bad trip. And people wonder why I won't touch anything stronger than vodka and orange juice!

But it passed, and the dreams passed, and the energies cleared. The fever broke, and the stream of nicotine in my blood resumed, and everything was okay again.

Still, now, in a sort of vaccuum-y, too-much-caffeine, floaty, distant mood, the thing about having your hands far away from you was pretty damned freaky. Kinda reminded me of that part in "Twin Peaks" when Deputy Hawk says "Body and spirit are still far apart," about Ronette Pulaski, who is lying there having herself a grand old state of comatose-ness. That sentence always bothered me a little, too. More so because I was eating "Coffee Coffee Buzz Buzz Buzz" ice cream the first time I watched that episode.

But still, I read on. Thus far, the book had been flighty little ramblings, with occasionally coherent passages. For the most part, though, you never know, from one sentence to the next, what the dude is talking about.

I read this:

"...All forgotten fears are there again... The fear that a small woollen thread that sticks out of the hem of my blanket may be hard, hard and sharp like a steel needle; the fear that this little button on my nigtshirt may be bigger than my head; the fear that this crumb of brea now falling from my bed may arrive glassy and shattered on the floor, and the burdensome worry lest at that really everything will be broken, everything for ever; the fear that the torn border of an opened letter may be something forbidden that no one ought to see, something indescribably precious for which no place in the room is secure enough; the fear that if I fell asleep I might swallow the piece of coal lying in front of the stove; the fear that some number may begin to grow in my brain until there is no more room for it inside me; the fear that it may be granite that I am lying on, grey granite; the fear that I may shout, and that people may come running to my doorand finally break it open; the fear that I may betray myself and tell all that I dread; and the fear that I might not be able to say anything, because everything is beyond utterance, --and the other fears... the fears.

...And this terrified me. I was shaking when I read it a second time, and a third, as I have read all of these paragraphs over a second time and a third. I'm not sure what, exactly, was so horrifying about it. I, who giggle at scary movies, who am disgusted by gore and guts but who am quite capable of ignoring most of it; I, who am disturbed by ideas in books and movies and the occasional episode of X'files, but never actually AFRAID... I felt clammy all over. I did not want to be alone. It seemed as if the images in the book, the ideas, this person's worst nightmares, could maybe crawl out of the book and attack me if I was alone. Most of all, I did not want to be alone in a house with that book.

I feel so stupid now, saying this. I have not been afraid of a book since I was 7 years old and hid a book under the couch. I don't remember what exactly it was that scared me; something about somebody getting sick, I think. As a matter of fact, I think it might have been Stephen King's "It," which didn't bother me at all when I read it at 16. I was afraid to be alone in the house with a book. Maybe it was that image of the number in his head growing larger and larger; it reminded me of that stupid, happy, blue-and-beige "3" that kept growing and smiling at me.

I picked up the book and shoved it into my bag. I brushed my hair until it stopped looking like a rat's nest, put on my coat, and headed to the Belmar, a sweet little college-kid bar a few blocks away. If Norman wasn't there, oh well -- at least there would be SOMEONE there, and I could get some orange juice and be among human beings who could somehow get my mind off of insane numbers growing in my head.

And if Norman WAS there, I'd stride up to him and I'd hold out "The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge," and demand, "Baby, what's WRONG with him???" And if he smiled at me, then I'd smile too, and remember that it's just a book, written by a guy who died 75 years ago. And if he told me what was wrong with the guy, maybe even gave away some of the rest of the book -- I am, after all, only on page 60 -- that would be okay too. At least then someone else would sort of... sort of be there for me as all this stuff is creeping me out... At least I would concretely know that someone else has been through this book and can hug me at the weird parts.

There's a part too, a little bit before that... I'll not bother with the whole paragraph again, just this: "...But the Big Thing swelled and grew over my face like a warm bluish boil and grew over my mouth and already the shadow of its edge lay upon my remaining eye..."

I had a sinus infection once, and had a nightmare about something growing over my face, stifling me, pushing me so far into myself that I was invisible to the outside world, that I was slowing becoming invisible even to myself: my senses became gradually duller and less aware. I called it The Death Dream, and I wrote about it a few months ago in this journal. I still remember vividly the terribleness of that dream. I am not a person who has frequent nightmares, and certainly not a person who has frequent hallucinatory visions, but nightmares stick with me, and somehow, this author, Rainer Maria Rilke, brought ALL of them back to me in just a few pages.

I ran to the Belmar. Norman was there. He saw me and said, "hi, baby! You finally woke up!" I said, "yeah," and started to reach into my bag for the book, to ask him, "baby, what's WRONG with this guy?" But I looked around, and people were laughing and drinking, and nightmares and frightening words, and frightfully ACCURATE nightmarish words were not a part of the Belmar, and I had to keep silent, although I still kind of wanted to demand of Norman, "what's wrong with him?"

Instead, I tried to wipe the weird look off my face and act like a normal person again. "Did you know I was gonna be here?" Norman asked. "How'd you know I'd come here?" Norman had evidently had enough beer to forget that it was snowing outside and he'd left footprints, although I supposed from the beginning that he'd go there. I said, "I just guessed," which was true, and then, "I was just... I was just freaking myself out, I guess..." He looked perplexed. I guess I would have to.

"Freaking yourself out?"

"Um... I'm gonna get some orange juice and then... I'll be right back... But I'm mad thirsty."

So I went and asked for orange juice. The bartender asked for ID. "For ORANGE juice?" I asked, giving her a bitchy incredulous look. "It's after ten," she explained, "and nobody under 21 is allowed in here."

I looked around. Norman was looking directly at me, although I suspect he was just having a good time with his friends and staring without really seeing me. He was laughing. No, he wasn't looking at me, but sort of through me. That kind of freaked me out as well. His friends were looking at each other and laughing. Everybody was laughing and smiling and drinking and being merry, and I was underage and scared of a book.

I fled. I lit a cigarette, so as not to look like a total loser just running out the door, but as soon as I had that cigarette lit, I did just that: ran as fast as I could to get away from my stupid, terrified self, and the stupid book that was still in my bookbag and... maybe trying to grab me, or suck my brains or something. Or make me hallucinate numbers and things. Make me lose touch. What a horrible idea. I never, never, never want to lose touch with what seems like reality.

I fled. I ran past Norman's apartment. I could see from the street that I'd left the lights on, but I didn't care. I ran to my house, flung open the door, ran up the stairs, and sat down at my computer to cower.

When I had that stupid fever, when all those little stupid thoughts were running incontrollably through my mind, I told nobody. Not even Norman. Now I've written about that, and I've written that a book scared me, and that I'm underage: I'm a scared little girl who doesn't have a couch to hide her book under. Nor a futon, for that matter. I'd lock it in the closet, but a.) that's stupid, and b.) the book is thin enough to slip under the door if it wanted to...

(I sound like I'm losing my mind... Please don't commit me...)

I checked my email, checked my phone messages, and called Aaron. And so Aaron and I went out, had wings and orange juice at The Spot, and drove around. And talked. I told him about the book. I read him a part of it. He didn't seem scared. "Whoa..." he said, grinning his trademark Aaron grin that looks half mischievous and half-retarded. "Yeah!" I bet if Aaron read the whole thing, it would scare him too.

And now I'm home again, and the book is sitting next to me. There's a picture of a bridge on the cover. It's white with red and black letters. I don't want to touch it.

It's almost six in the morning and I'm wide awake. STILL. I don't think I'll sleep tonight, don't think I can. I'm afraid if I fall asleep, I'll swallow a lump of coal lying by the stove. Also, I'm too jittery and wound up to sleep. This is the damned LAST time I take anything for cramps other than Tylenol. I think I'm going to go back to Norman's house and hide the book under his futon. I can't read any more of it tonight.

I'll finish it soon, I think. I don't think I'm going to be able to hide this one away for very long. I'm going to want to pick it up again, out of curiousity about what's WRONG with this guy... I'm going to scare myself silly again, maybe -- or maybe I'm only scared because I'm a little high on the recommended dose of over-the-counter drugs -- and read until the end. But not now.

I feel a little better now, after going out with Aaron. Aaron may be occasionally fucked up, but he's awfully sane, for being a friend of MINE. He also kind of radiates sanity and safety, although I suspect he'll laugh when he reads that.

But still... "I am afraid."

~Helena*

"I sit here reading a poet. There are a lot of people in the reading room, but one is not aware of them. They are in the books. Sometimes they move in the pages, like sleepers who turn over between two dreams..." --"The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge," by Rainer Maria Rilke.