The Nightly Dance

I wrote this about a year ago, shortly after I was diagnosed with epilepsy. I'm doing much better now, but I still like this piece.

My genetics are the very things from which monsters are bred: distorted features, Medusa hair, misaligned spines, and banshee voices. It's the fairy stories. It's the howling violins. Encoded into my DNA, twisting the double helix so tight that it threatens to snap each time it replicates. Night after night, thunderstorms rip through my brain. The electricity animates my body into myclonic dance. I do not rest. I dance with the demons; I dance with Nijinsky rage. I dance with the fury of Saint Vitus and his wooden cross. My shoes are fashioned with my own fear, tanned and stretched over my feet. The music is the low rumble of static, white noise generated from a typewriter key jammed in-between stations in one of the valves of my heart.

The mornings are the worst. Hungover and drained, the residue from the dance clings to my bones so tightly that I cannot wake up unless I throw myself to the floor from bed. I punch and kick at the wooden boards in frustration because my head is too heavy for my neck to support by itself; I have seven cervical vertebrae, and seven is not enough. Every morning I picture the same thing: Once, I saw a picture of a giraffe's spine. They have seven, too, but their vertebral bodies look like they could withstand several thousand tons of pressure. They are stalwart and sound, not delicate and susceptible to crushing like ours. As I turn my body into a fulcrum, I wish for a giraffe's spine. Iron and solid, I would be unstoppable. I would still feel like I was moving through sand, but I could move.

Fine motor skills are non-existent. It does not matter how large of an obstacle is in my path — if it is there, it will cause me injury, despite stepping to avoid it. The dance is in perpetual motion. My hands will strike the wall. My legs will want to be parallel with the shower floor. I brush my teeth, and my mouth is full of blood; my toothbrush becomes a weapon when my body is so unstable. Even when my full attention is devoted to the smallest of actions, they remain impossible.

A self-destruction sequence has been initiated. I started taking pills to slow this process down. They're roughly the size of a needle's eye and stamped with words and numbers I haven't bothered to read. But there is no reset function. My central nervous system is rebelling harder, severing its own connections with steel teeth. I have not slept. There is no sleep. Until my brain rots like wood, until my corpus collosum fills with pus and collapses, bubbling with the fear and electricity conducting through it. Until a piece of me will spark and catch flame, and I will burn away into a pile of ash.

I hate this waiting game; the telegraphs should disintegrate under the force of my frenzied tapping.

And I've got nothing.

Sometimes I feel like I'm trapped in a Philip K. Dick book.

Characteristically, I'm solely aware that it's all fiction. There's the dilemma of warning the other characters: On one hand, to do so is to get labeled as the crazy, unstable personality; on the other, I'm the dark-haired and dark-eyed but fair-skinned female, so in PKD lore, that automatically and predictably makes me the catalyst (and prone to sunburn). At some point, I'm going to meet the main character. At first, the encounter will seem like simple coincidence, but in the grand scheme of reality it will be much deeper. He will have plenty of things wrong with him and on the whole has no business being in charge of an entire story. Somehow, we'll save the world by the end of the book -- mostly by his doing, although I'll have a key moment in there somewhere.

Until that point, however, I'll creep ever-closer to the edges of the pages. Each time I do, a shock will be issued, and I'll be thrown back. I'll catch my breath, pull myself back up, and try again. And again. And again. Someday, I'll get word out -- a message in a bottle -- that I'm real, that I'm trapped, and that I need help.

Sometimes, to think of my existence in this way instead of what it actually is, seems more comforting, or at the very least, makes more sense. I came home from work on Friday in a state of seizure and haven't been right since. For the most part, I can't really remember what has gone on for the past few days, or that they even existed in the first place. There have been moments of clarity and normalcy, sure. But mostly they bled into states in which I was dimly aware of my own being, staring out from behind a sense of sand and marbled glass, mouth slack and open, eyes straight and staring, limbs twitching, repeating "I'm fine." in a voice garbled by static emanating from a creature that was several fathoms deep.

My legs hurt, and I feel like a part of my brain never switched back on. Maybe that's why I'm writing something now -- to see if I still can. To see if words still work, to see if rhythm still works, all of it. It's taken me a very long time to type this out. Commas keep showing up in the middle of words and my hands are shaking. But what I want to say is still there, so I'm not too worried. And normally, I wouldn't even be worried. I've just never had it last this long before.

I don't want to go to the hospital because they can't do anything for me there. Really, they can't. It's a pointless endeavor. I've been to the ER several times for my epilepsy, and nothing really happens. I'm better off at home.

 

If I can't even write about it, then I've got nothing.

 

On writing, or on life; I don't know which.

Walking home from work this morning, I was framing each step like a good photographer: The way the waxing light hit the bricks of the building, the remarkable fusion of ancient bits of glass with the cracks in the sidewalk; the scanning the sky for promised thunderstorms. However, it wasn't simply limited to the visual. The visual is just something I have trained myself to do (and, regrettably, don't do very much of anymore, though I hope to reverse that soon); the act of framing scenes in my is what I've always done, unconscious and unprompted.

And so the words shot through my head like meteors, describing my lungs as the struggled for air against the oppressive heat; the scrape of the sidewalk against my shoes; the bed waiting for me in the apartment perched high above the street. I had the sense that time wasn't acting correctly. Suddenly, there was a hand on my arm. I turned; it was a crossing guard, and I was prepared to tell her that I was an adult and I didn't require her assistance. Instead, a jolt of electricity ran through me, and my response was to fall to the ground. I could see her look of shock, but I couldn't hear her through my headphones. Believe me, I was fine with that. I'm sure she said something. Her mouth was moving.

Last week, when I was walking home from work, I'm not completely sure what happened, but I regained consciousness on the sidewalk, scraped up, bewildered, and steps from my apartment. The last thing I remember is crossing the street and having the sense that it was something I had done ten years prior. Nobody was around. Maybe the world had ended.

Remembering this and half out of consciousness, I somehow pulled myself up off the street, darted into traffic, and ran the whole way home, shaking wildly and wondering why time was acting so erratically and where that buzzing was coming from. It wasn't far. But I'll be damned if I was going to have a seizure in front of a crossing guard and half of goddamn Pittsburgh traffic.

A sense of horror, playing out day by day. I've taught myself to not think about it anymore and instead turn it into a series of jokes at my own expense. There's no escape from epilepsy. It's less like a Lovecraftian monster that can immobilize you at any time when it's hilarious.

When I had the idea for this website, it was with the intent to give my writing a home -- to get myself writing again. The silly stuff I post was just going to be there. I've been slowly realizing that I haven't been writing because I've gotten myself into a place where I don't want to write because it's painful to think. Not that I ever stop thinking, but I've been in a painful place for a while. That's probably not the best way to be going about things, considering. It's time that I start tearing myself apart again. In the past, that's where my best work always came from, and I want to start producing more of my best work again. I know I'm good, I know I can, and I'm not afraid of the hard work involved.

There's some Henry Rollins quote that's something along the lines of "It's sad when someone you know becomes someone you knew." Sometimes, I feel like epilepsy is doing that to me. Or my job, in some capacity -- that it's making me lose my focus on what's really important. That's what's happening, and I don't want it to happen anymore. My goal is to be a published science fiction writer. I don't have any crazy aspirations to win a Nebula Award, or anything -- but that's all I've ever wanted. I don't want to get married or have children. I don't want a big house. I just don't care about anything else, really. All I want is to tell stories, and in turn have enough to survive on. That's it. (And maybe next week, I can save the universe.)

So, if seizing on the sidewalk makes for a great story, fine. I guess I can deal with that. But only if I can turn the crossing guard into an unholy creature that devours time. Because that would be awesome.