Part 1

i want to get this out before the details fade and while the details are vibrant on oxycodon.

over a labor day climbing trip i managed to punch a hole in my palm with a big impact fall while hiking.

the key details is that the wound was deep — I must have landed on a sharp rock — and that it stopped bleeding fast. these are ingredients for infection.

so i watched my cut for any signs. apart from forming into an ugly puncture-bruise, the thing was fine.  I climbing in the gym, I felt great, etc etc.

cut to seven days later — saturday night — I wake up repeatedly from pain in my hand. things have suddenly gotten a lot worse: I notice new redness, its quite painful. As this is a weekend and the student health center is closed, I go to an “Urgent Care” clinic as directed by Stanford insurance.  Here, they bide their time, but eventually open it up, eventually take an x-ray, eventually get me some pain medication, finally get me antibiotic. At the emotional high point of the story, my right hand is being tightly bandaged to a hefty splint, my left hand is finally poked with an IV needle, and I burst out crying with no palms free to hide my face or wipe tears. next, to distill my entire experience at the clinic into one moment, one nurse asks the other: “where are the tissues? do we have any facial tissue in this room?” the second replies: “um.. no, no.. I think we are all out, remember?” and I continue bawling, tears unhindered. preceding this moment was a very long hour during which a comedy tag-team of nurses each took a turn at briefly entering my room, makeing a statement/question like: so you got your pain meds already?, and then leveing confused.

finally, i’ve had the cocktails slipped into my vein and i’m sent home.  by this time my hand and arm are both bloated, red enormous. what started as a red lick at my wrist has crawled to my elbow, leaving an obvious trail. i take a lot of Vicodin that night. everything is worse in the morning.

To Be Continues In: Part 2

(Spoiler: the heroine lives to tell the tale.)

half a bottle of wine in and i’m back to my old self. back the old self into an empty house and the words come surface forward.

now i understand why i sometimes come back from climbing with matt and find lisl almost drunk and cooking something complicated while spewing tv-on-the-computer into the kitchen. i tried coming back to an empty dark house today and found myself here: finally writing in the journal with a mug of wine in hand and broiled zucchini in my stomach.

my hesitations about a relationship with matt: i’m not a writing, circle thinking Alina in his company. I don’t talk  about the things my old self loved to dwell on. Do we need to grow out of an “existential crisis” stage and stop thinking so much about thinking? Is this a mature, balanced version of my self?

one small, tiny, small conversation re-seeded a tree of thoughts and the roots can be found in high school.

i used to think that every conflict had to play out like a novel: both characters tell their side, show their cards and the childhood grievance that gave each adult this complex is revealed. with the cause aired, we should never have the argument again. instead, we are one step closer to repaired. with matt i’ve learned to let things slide back under the surface. we will both pretend we’re not mad and soon believe this.

he tells me: please stop talking; please lets not talk about this and i obey. this request is the most hurtful he can make.

then again, he is right. there is something about living with another person that makes you blame him when you’re tired and hungry and your day at work didn’t go well. i seem to create conflict out of a nothing and it melts back into a semi-nothing even without my usual careful examination. some hurts are not worth wording. or they may do more damage once made explicit.

sometimes, i want milk directly out of the carton. for that fresh-squeezed taste. often, i forget the strength of my strengths. when i live in an orange hoodie i want you to admit that this is part of a life choice that your friends can make. i get the feeling that when i suffer a little you suffer a lot. if i can’t shoulder the consequences of my actions because this is your shoulder, too and your shoulder should always feel light, then i am missing the choice of making mistakes, i don’t want to feel obligated to be perfectly functional because you want a power-couple stride to your shoes. its interesting to be in a relationship with the enemy. i used to feel a jealous envy of resentment to the competent kids. they work so hard to stay ahead of the curve, to play the game. now, this ability to tread water is suddenly the expectation. of course you’ll be better than perfect. of course you will be a stable fact-sorter instead of spontaneous genius light on her feet because she is dancing damage control. but the truth is:
i haven’t been able to live up to my own story
i haven’t been able to deliver on the bigger goals that grow from small disappointments.
when i don’t achieve the current-most desires i deal with the situation by building bigger, brighter goals for the future. this all talk, no productivity standards is a five-year-plan with russian soul. just ask stalin how ambition fed the masses.
one thing i still need to learn is the separation of talk and action and how the two cousins are often mistaken for each other.
today i told zoe on the phone about dealing with a clash between reality and head-narrative and how bigger plans for the future are not the way to compensate for today’s failure.
failure is how to deal with failure. the hardest part is not wiggling free.

losing sight gaining sight

i passed my qual despite my best efforts. the process was so painful i squirmed under the memories for the past twenty hours and i’m still in what feels like a hot water bath on my brain. conclusions will be listed below and numbered.

1. i don’t know how to write to communicate effectively. somehow, not only can my thoughts not come in order, they also can’t come in words. as exemplified in the preceding sentence and the double list of double sentences, i am not legible.  i need to take longer to write what other people take shorter.

2. i need to stop thinking with my laziness and my ego. somehow the only victory i envision is winning the grant, grade, prize on my own terms in my own ways. despite not playing their game etc etc. this has harmed me over and over. this ideal of how to win is based on laziness and ego — i need to let go and just plain do what i’m told.

3. the old self would have wanted me to pass with less of a burn. the new self is very glad this has happened so early so prior to permanent, s serious damage.

4. i need to climb less and do science more. this is a terrible start. this is a fair judgement on me, though. i need to pay penance and act accordingly — not act as a wronged child. their assesment was more than fair and balanced. i did not pass — i passed.

time to learn. time to learn to stop hating myself. they tell me there exists the secret of separating failure from ego. i need to accept this outcome as a good thing for me.

even our love letters were arguments

a day later and i’ve moved from a happiness to the same dark spot. he knows the critical criticism.

a day later and i’m brighter than ever because we were in a dark spot but scrambled out.

i want to remember this victory. this is the hardest I’ve worked so far. in retrospect, my past relationships have been a fun game or a listless drifting prone to detachment and the occasional act of resentment. i guess the primary question is if this work load is an indication of a good thing or an indication of hopelessness. our honeymoon period was all of two seconds and based entirely on my oblivious smile.

i met his parents yesterday. his farther, bernard, i loved very much. he is french and emphatic and closes his eyes when he is talking and thinking hard at the same time. he told me in confidence that matt, like he, is very sensitive. i can answer my question from above using the love story matt grew up with. matt’s mother dumped bernard multiple times — but he was persistent. conflict is a story — peace is the pause between the words. in comparison to matt, the past seems like a row of strangers. but matt seems like the only one armed. i’m so happy we collided, tangled. i’m so sad that things aren’t perfect and easy with this person.

 

its 1am and i’m eating giant leaves of a giant, paisley shaped cabbage matt found for me on the stanford community farm. i drove home in semi-dry heaves after dropping him off. i was heaving somewhere between happy and terrified. you have just witnessed a break-up and a re-union. was that too fast?  did you blink?  did you miss it?

my heart is going to explode in a continuous burst of  explosion. i can’t remember what my immediate future will look like as this has changed a million times today. the rug has been swept out from under and then replaced, then pulled, then rearranged, then then then lit on fire. my frame feels small — the ribs cannot hold. i really, really can’t sleep.

splitting infinitives

i’ve been told i’m a powerful pull: me and adventure and rock climbing — we are a team, together.

matt asks the exact opposite: how can i tell if this new-found happiness is from you or the activities? i think this whole time he has meant: i don’t like you, i like climbing. and i don’t like waking up this early to go find new trails in the CA hills.

this has been hard for me to understand, hard for me to sink into this division between a person still and a person moving. are her actions objects that fall from her limbs and out of her sleeves? an infinite birthing — spinning moons off into an ether — creating worlds of life by a dynamic mother.

The separation seems unfair. If the new planets remain in orbit, can I still call them sun? Can they keep my last name?

The immediate relief of yesterday seems replaced by stomach flips and complete lack of mental discipline. I’m going to go get some chocolate milk. Maybe pace furiously towards the hills that surround us on all sides. I can’t point myself towards homework so I’ll point to calories and circular gestures. The hands will go around to follow my head. The pain is going to lose this chase.

everything again

molecules come together, molecules break apart. i’m at the age where every interaction seems seeded with a long-term future. i’m at the age where i am pregnant with vulnerability, open at the heart. matt was a good boy to let in. the door is having trouble swinging shut. my face is having trouble closing doors.

you didn’t bring out the best in me. i’m still trying to stagger back to principles, to understanding. or maybe — that was very unfair of me — you just showed me what i was doing wrong. i guess i refused to see how, even in the best-case, the circumstance would be judgement against me regardless of the outcome. we hit the beginning of the end right at the beginning. when i was very wrong, very stubborn on memorial day. i hope this is not for attention, not for a back-winning. a part of me wants to prove that i am better than he knows. this is the greedy part. what is the best way to attract? is it to mildly repel? independent of perverse motivation, i am hurting myself a good amount so the lesson can be learned in a memorable way. i should have been matt back then and shaken myself into an awake state. its hard to shake your own shoulders. its hard to find clarity when alternative incentives are strong.

reset rewind redo redo redo. i had such a strong sense of invincibility. of invisibility. a child in the center of the room with a blanket over her head.

i’m going to sit in this hood over my head until i curl up and die.

the conclusion from this relationship is that i was not a good enough person. this is not me missing a superficial morality, a social gesture, a trapping he left unexamined and is blindly missing. i wanted to ascribe his criticism to an old-fashioned moral compass. instead, i’m realizing his judgments have been milder than my own would have been, had i been wearing my head.

instead, i’ve been wearing my heart. on my head. like a dunce cap.

i spent the morning feeling buried. i started a serious conversation on g-chat and realized i was way out of my depth in terms of analysis and observation. i was reporting back on my feelings; he had probed the issue with thought and understanding. this is not the usual turn to events — i have to figure out why i’m not more willing to be more rational. the problem of not wanting to not like what i find?

i spent the morning figuring out how to make free iced coffee in lab. the heat wave motivated me to scope out the best source of ice, secure milk options, and figure out how to cool the espresso shots. it seems simple but to a buried brain the task was monumental and involved multiple instances of juggling. right now the caffeine is poking small holes in the heaviness above my head.  its a feeling at the back and base of my neck which will eventually get me moving experimentally. but not yet.

the world is a tragedy to those who feel

i’m waiting out the heat with an awake brain. Its still a balmy 70 outside so my vibrating body can’t stay under the covers and i can’t burrow into sleep.  there is also one fly in my room making the Doppler effect circles at the decibels of a small helicopter.  i also ran out of benadryl — benadryl is probably the only reason i’ve been pleasantly retreating into sleep for the past week. i only have the itching left: somehow, my arm pits managed to get poison oak. i don’t have it on the rest of my body but these two weeks i’ve been trying to manage a reaction specific to those damp, rubbing spots. combined with a radio silence from matt, this feels like a punishment for all my sins. this is, arguably, a pretty poor way to spend the night.

we had tentative, secret plans made by eye and head gesture to escape the heat by another night in the meadow. with the horses. instead, i’m stuck thinking about him while he doesn’t call. it may be much braver to admit my pathetic, hot, itchy state.

why am i going for bravery these days?

i’ve trapped the fly in the bathroom!