Dear far-flung friends and family,
I hope you are well, your friends and family also. I hope also it’s been something of a merry Christmas, hopefully, all fingers crossed for best wishes and possibilities for the new new year. What a Sequel. Is it a comedy or a tragedy? I can’t tell. 2021 has been quiet on the outside and loud on the inside. I’d like 2022 to the opposite.
I’ve been searching for an updraft, like a rigid seagull, gliding into shore, hoping to lift the year up into some semblance of meaning and not crash into the cliff wall.
Peak drama for the year took place in late Feb, early March. I Assumed I had poisoned myself with under cooked lima beans. Having spent the previous two days writhing around on the floor. In so much pain I couldn’t sleep. I assumed I was on the downward slope to recovery, freezing cold, in bed, with multiple layers. Electric blanket. But the worst of the pain seemed to have passed. I was attending a meditation class, wearing a ridiculous VR headset. The monk, Kelsang Rabten was intoning; our lives, struggles and pains are illusory, mere appearance to mind. I am trying to apply the lesson to my current predicament and ‘transcend the pain’. The shivering is getting quite animated, distracting, almost cartoon like. I try to accept it, go beyond it. But there is a gnawing fear. My whole body is shaking, my jaw is half clenching, and my hands are curling. A memory echoes, I’m sitting in my memories, helplessly, behind someone as they have a seizure on the bus. Their body is locked up, looking up in vacant despair. I can’t tell If they see me too. I’m reflected, illuminated and clear, in a room with two doors. One leads to an infinite, light, formless space, and the other… A voice in my mind interrupts.
“Do you want to live? Or do you want to die? F*ck this mind over matter bs”
I’m snapped back to reality. Immediately I get up, open my bedroom door and plunge myself back into the world, the fight or flight mechanism has well and truly kicked in.
Something is very wrong. I can’t control my body properly. I’m terrified and like a baby homing elephant, immediately go to my mother. A 40-year-old’s vestigial imprint for a situation that is self-evident. I don’t remember what I said, but it’s clear. As much as I don’t want to be a burden, that it is an emergency. I am not getting better. I am certainly and suddenly much, much, worse. Pacing in a controlled stagger, back and forth in a compulsive loop. With an instinct to stay upright with whatever bodily autonomy I can maintain. She called 999. An ambulance is on its way.
Turns out I had a fever. Not cold but hot. Rigors. The paramedics strip me to my t-shirt, and I start sweating like a fountain. I thought I was going to die in the ambulance. The longest 10 minutes of my life. Struggling to breath, in rapid shallow breaths. My blood pressure is on the floor, and I was melting. afraid my heart was going to stop. It was ironic, that visceral irrefutable feeling, in contrast to the imaginary version that beckoned me home from Berlin in the years before. I found myself, in a wheelchair in St. James’ A&E, the last place anyone wants to be, especially during the pandemic, too afraid to ask for water, soaked head to toe in my own sweat. The silent hysteria. I am struggling to hold my head up, or put it down. Representing my intention, to keep on living, and with relief, accepting that it was ok to die. It was euphoric, the feeling of being taken in.
The doctor congratulated me for having the sense to come to hospital. ‘Well done, well done.’ A succession of hospital rituals, heart traces, blood tests, intravenous drips, fluids and antibiotics, X-rays and CT scans and an appendectomy at about 8am the next day.
Covid was the almost invisible wallpaper of my recovery, only discovered when I gave it to my sister, Siobhan. Downsides: weird pain behind my eyes. A doddering out of body feeling while walking, a coughing routine in the shower to empty the night jar of its bright green slime. Upsides: Immunity to Papa John’s Chilli Freak Pizza. No uncontrollable hiccupping. Having been thrown down the other side of Mount Doom, I existed half sitting, half laying, and everything was pleasure in comparison. Except of course, work.
I resigned 3 months into a 6 month contract with the realisation that the job would either kill me now or kill me later. I found myself wondering what Bob Marley would do? Sure as f*ck not be making emails for Barclays f*cking bank. Classic lockdown covid submarine logic, devoid of all the stabilising relativism of the real world. Still, one impulsive leap of faith leads to another. Gut feelings. In the purgatory that exists between contracts, the dark over a starless sea, I sent a flippant job application to Zalando in Berlin. The same Zalando of naïve hope and disappointment of my two previous letters. I wasn’t sure I wanted to do this kind of job anymore, but if I did, I certainly wanted to work with some enthusiastic people, all eager to learn and collaborate. The cold cynicism melted back into familiar enthusiasm in the interviews, anxious and re-assuring familiarity gave way to quiet confidence, I got the job. Poetically imagining it was a dream like unconditional love, a dove that you set free only to find it returns, to be my first permanent job. Graduating the university of insecure work and prepped to leave home, all over again. Press play and repeat, again. Maybe it was meant to be after all.
…. I’ll see if I am brave enough to post the second half
Xtina
Nobody should be making emails for Barclays. I really enjoy your writing. Exciting being on a Belgian domain. Hoping you post the second part of the letter <3