5-15-14

I do not sleep. I do not eat.

Ten years. Today marks ten years. Did I sleep then? Was I asleep this hour ten years ago? I know I was afraid. I wanted to turn into a bird even then. So lost, so lost, so lost, so lost. All circumstance seemed a dread ocean, and I trapped in its undertow. If you fight it, I said, you shall lose all your energy and drown, and so I surrendered for the strength to tread water.

If I could somehow send love back through time, I would send it back ten years. Then perhaps...

I do not eat. I do not sleep. I ache.

There is the rain, though. I love it as a friend. If I do not sleep all through the night, I shall go walk in it when the dawn breaks.

I am so cold. I wear the blanket K_____ gave me, and headphones, and play Nyman on the piano, abnegating myself in arpeggios. I dissolve. I fade. I am not there; only the accents are there, and the tidal arpeggios. And I think: this is it. I shall give myself over to this instrument...to music...to this ocean. The world is too cold. 

And he...and what if he...what if the scans show...

"Over half of people with lung cancer die within a year of being diagnosed."

He has grown so thin. He seems so small, so fragile.

If the car had not broken down, I do not believe I would have spoken to him again. I would never have known. And who am? I who cannot manage even friendship? I who can say only "it hurts too much...I just...but you can call...I do not mind...if you need to...you can call."

And he is respectful; he does not call. Yet I must call and ask soon...

Ten years. An end to ten years. I must ask...

I do not eat. I do not sleep.

And he...

I'm being irrationally anxious...unexplained weight loss could mean so many things...

Yet if...the doctor's concern...the family history...the cigarettes...

And if it is? Half of people within one year?

But is may very well not be. He is not coughing terribly; he is elsewise fine. Statistics are fret-mongerers. I am being irrational.

It is ten years today. Ten years. I went to the library and got book after book on epistemology. Hume. Dewey. Epistemology and the ancients. Epistemology and the moderns. Epistemology and you. I woke. I did my morning exercises. I filled out my health insurance application. I looked into the PHD philosophy program, as L____ recommended. And I felt happiness; I felt excitement. I shall study my reasons for belief and non-belief, I said, I shall find out...

Was it only a stray glance at the date? Is that the root of my present terror of finding out...is it all because I glimpsed a few numbers in a line?

I wish I could live in the arpeggios.