The Basics

It was a while that I was sad in California. I thought I remembered it all until just yesterday, when I was in the shower, and a memory was unearthed of me at the prized marble table in my studio with a candle lit, fingers flapping across my laptop keyboard as I crafted an email to my then-boss containing a note from the emergency room.

And my mother was there, on the lip of the bed. She’d flown in after I’d called her from the hospital phone with a plastic bracelet around my wrist. I’d tried to read a book under the papery sheets in the hallway of the hospital where they’d put me for three hours, but couldn’t focus, couldn’t care—my eyes leaked unstoppably into the crunch of the pillowcase while a nurse reassured me. I do not remember her face or her name. Just the outline of her scrubs, the word “honey,” her careful watch.

The depth of that sadness was low, bowing, and navy. I did not cry, I did not sob—I liquidated. My insides became my outsides and weighed cool, metallic tons, leveling my body under covers dormant, sleek, and still. I was an alien among normies driving to the local co-op after my release to purchase a box of hot, soft food. I was a shadow swallowing it in my car beneath a tree. I was headed back. To life?

To where I lived.

It does not matter today why I was sad. Just that I remembered. Remembered a detail I’d forgotten.

___

It was a privilege to be sad in California. It held me well. The fruit trees, the air, the moving river. One foot in front of the other—a concentrated effort.

I remember the silvery November light baring tree sides and the white tips of my sneakers. My mother walked with me each day past the Governor’s Mansion, the Russian Orthodox Church, and the Golden 1 Center to the bridge.

Then she flew home, and I did it on my own.

I remember sitting on the floor of Zay’s apartment across from mine. I detailed an intricate plan to pursue the group sessions in the brochure the hospital had provided me, to spend any time I had away from work napping and therapizing. I planned to write more, take an online class, and whiten my teeth. Zay suggested just vacuuming.

In other words, the basics.

___

From there, my life narrowed. At the grocery store, I selected fresh things I could smuggle past my zilch appetite. I prepared cups of tea that I never finished. Slept often. Sometimes I felt something terrible bending inside me, watching the afternoon light turn orange against the far wall before a nap. But then sleep would leak in and turn it all off for a while.

I took those walks and leaned over the bridge on wet and windy nights to stare at the technicolor Ferris wheel, the docked boats, the streetlamps. It was the season the crows crowded the skies near nightfall, swooping over our homes in full runaway. I’d lie on the mat at the gym between sets and feel my eyes get glassy with emotion: the way the world peeled open a little with small movements. A sense of escape, parallel with the birds.

I took long baths, and I kept my hair clean, and I whitened my teeth after all. I longed for respite, curling over my own naked chest in the tub where my heart hurt. Everything—the walls, the water, my limbs—sang with placidity and boredom. But I scrubbed the countertops and kept the sink clear. Lit candles on that marble table. And I vacuumed.

The trick was to stay busy and simple until it changed. To let the sun and the moon roll over the earth in their wise patterns of rotation and distance. My only job: to survive. To catalog each day having tended to the basics, a form of self-care that did not derive from pre-existing motivations, but rather, necessity. These small demonstrations of self-care informed my feelings instead of the other way around.

And I thought of this because today in Indiana, I can hardly feel the sun. I am afraid of the way I feel. But my pup forced me out onto the sidewalk downtown, the sky high and hazy. I saw the cinch of jeans around the ankles of a woman walking across the street, and there was something soothing about her stride, the way the pants ballooned out and fell; it organized something previously harrying to my mental infrastructure.

I went home and I vacuumed.

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