The Side Effects of Starving - Chapter One
This time, it's the face of a green monster, grimacing with every blink of my digital clock.Another hallucination. Terrific.
It's hard to close your eyes when there's a demon by your bed.
I saw a movie once that summarized insomnia better than I ever could. "When you have insomnia," the narrator explained, "You're never really asleep, and you're never really awake." And they showed a man, lying on his couch, his face vacant, bathed in the glow of the television, looking much the way I expect I look watching "Law and Order" re-runs at three in the morning.
I used to think I couldn't sleep because of caffeine. I gave up caffeine. All that did was make me more miserable during the day. I was still awake twenty hours a day, just less pleasant to be around.
Sooner or later, I gave in to insomnia. I started thinking about the most productive ways that I could use all the time that I didn't have to use trying to sleep. I spent a lot of quality time with the Internet. I spent a lot of time writing. But mostly, I watched a lot of television. I invested some time and discovered that whatever time of night it is, if you look hard enough, you will find "Law and Order" playing. I believe it plays consecutively from dusk until dawn on a variety of channels.
Of course, more than anything, being awake gave me time to think. I used to play a game where I would try to imagine the ideal man, in microscopic detail. I gave this up after realizing that perfection is death.
I still spend plenty of time thinking about men, though. I miss warm hands, and the kind of kissing so frantic that no one leads, no one follows.
I spend a lot of time remembering things. Like the bar mitzvah I went to when I was in the eighth grade, or a camping trip from my sophomore year of high school. Sometimes, a line of poetry comes to me whole, and I reach for the pen and scraps of paper that I keep by my bed, and scribble down my strange little thoughts. Periodically, I devour these puzzle pieces of insight, as a way of reassuring myself that I am still introspective.
Some of them have lost their potency. "Everybody needs to be somebody," probably doesn't mean as much to me, now, as it did when I wrote it. Six months ago, I wrote, "I have abandoned my search for the good man. He can either find me on his own, or I'll genetically engineer him when the technology becomes available." What still strikes me about this is that I wrote "the" good man, because of course; there is no possibility for plurality in that context.
I only saw the green demon for a few seconds. I never see things for more than a minute. And only at night. My first one was a cat, which flew through my kitchen and scared the hell out of me. I was seven, and we didn't have a cat. I asked my mother if she saw it, and she told me my eyes were playing tricks on me. I was disturbed by the idea that any part of me could be independently mischievous.
I still am. And to this day, my eyes and ears continue to enjoy themselves at my expense.
I'm told that everyone has a hallucination or two in their lives, and that they don't necessarily make me crazy. Only once one fails to distinguish between the actual and the imagined can one be considered mentally unhealthy, and I can usually tell the difference right away.
Besides, it's not as though I hear voices that tell me to do things. I just think my internal monologue is perhaps more like a dialogue.
When I tell Steve that I think I'm going crazy again, he just says, "The poor are crazy, you're not homeless or unemployed, therefore, you're eccentric." Which, to me, is splitting hairs.
I've thought about going to see a psychiatrist again. I haven't for two years, but now and then I think it might be time to go back. I'd like to really test myself and stay away, to learn to reassure myself that everything is normal and the world is not ending. So instead of calling up kindly Dr. So-and-So, I tell my problems to Steve. He never has much to say, and I feel guilty, because I think his silence means that even though we've spent a lot of time together, he still doesn't quite trust me. He tells me that he's "just so grateful to have friends" that he doesn't want to scare them off by having feelings or opinions. Most shy people I've known manage to have plenty of friends, because people are drawn to enigmas, to anyone or anything remotely cryptic. Being mysterious is just another way of being charming, and when someone says very little, it's only human to assume they're hiding fascinating alternate selves. I think Steve has gone through a lot of loneliness, though, much more than me. For years he didn't have friends, and then he made friends who he didn't like.
I wonder if having friends means anything if those friends don't really know you.
For years, I had friends who weren't enough. They were the kind of company that still feels like loneliness. I still have most of the same friends I had when I was depressed. They didn't change, I did. They became enough as soon as I started to let them.
If I could sketch, or paint, or sculpt, I would have a piece devoted to the green demon who appeared in my digital clock last night. It's harder to paint with words, but it's the best I can do. Part of the problem is that I don't know how to tell a story the way a story is supposed to be told. I don't know how to start at the beginning and stop at the end. All I ever end up with are character sketches, little bits of people, and emotions and memories. And they don't make up a story. They make up a life.
