I owe an apology

I think I owe an apology. In fact, I know I do. In a most roundabout and completely unintentional way I have been badly behaved. It happens sometimes, when I feel a little trapped or think that someone else is feeling trapped. I get prickley and build a wall you see. The wall has little airholes, though, which allow me to smile through. I’m not entirely sure this is a good thing. It may just be confusing to the person on the other side.

There are certain aspects of living and being that are hard for me. I don’t mention them much because, honestly, it’s a bit boring, even to me in my most navel-gazing times. They’re things that make some stuff impossible and make me want to scream and cry until I can scream and cry no more. It wouldn’t help, though, so instead I get the prickles, build the walls, and ignore it all.

The problem is that I then don’t give anybody the chance to get in. I assume how they’ll be, how they’ll react, what they’ll do and, in my mind, I save them from it all by moving steadfastly away in a prickley fashion. And, in the process, I fear that I can even be a little bit mean. This makes me sad. Like I said, I think I owe an apology, or two, possibly many. I just have no idea how to go about it.

Tuesday afternoon epiphany

One sentence, a beautiful, complementary one, reduced me to tears. It was somebody else’s thing but then it was mine. A completely unexpected Tuesday afternoon, a testament to the power of Social Networks, despite my complete cynicism toward them all.

Clicks of a mouse button in places far away, the realisation, again, that I was never alone in this. The heartbreak flooded in, drowning out everything else, filling me with tears, like a blow-up doll water balloon, but a loved one. Lucky, lucky me.

Fourteen years

Today is the day I feel naked, unzipped, unhinged. Silly really, but there you have it. Fourteen years ago, today, The Tragedy happened. Around about exactly now actually. I commented to G this morning that in all those fourteen years, each 1st of December has dawned as bright and blue and sunny as that one in 1996. I normally take the day off and do something beautiful. This time, I’m at Real Work. Feeling naked, unzipped, unhinged. The clouds are coming over. Weird. Maybe it’s because I came to work. I will do something beautiful over the weekend.

Everything just seems so close to the surface when I think about it. It’s watery and bare and it stings a little and it feels like yesterday that I lay on my dig’s carpet in the room I had packed up into a couple of boxes and a suitcase – four years of learning, living, loving, completely carefree (except, of course, for some good doses of teenage angst) into so little material stuff and so much wonderful ‘internal’ stuff. I listended to Eddie Vedder sing Off He Goes loudloudloud on my Walkman and cried fat tears for leaving that life behind. It feels like yesterday, but it was yesterday fourteen years ago.

Little did I know how big and fat those tears were. Maybe I did know. Maybe that’s why they were bigger, fatter, hotter. Or maybe they’ve just turned into that in the time that has passed since.

I am still here.



Off He Goes, Pearl Jam

Know a man
His face seemed pulled and tense
Like he's ridin' on a motorbike
In the strongest winds
So I approach with tact
Suggest that he should relax
But he's movin' much too fast

Said he'll see me on the flip side
On this trip he's taken for a ride
He's been takin' too much on
There he goes with his perfectly unkept hope
There he goes

He's yet to come back
But I seen his picture
It doesn't look the same up on the rack
We go way back
I wonder 'bout his insides
It's like his thoughts are too big for his size

He's been taken...where, I don't know
Off he goes with his perfectly unkept hope
There he goes

And now I rub my eyes, for he has returned
Seems my preconceptions are what should have been burned
For he still smiles... And he's still strong
Nothing changed but the surroundin' bullshit
That has grown

And now he's home and we're laughin'
Like we did, my same old, same old friend
Until a quarter to ten
I saw the strain creep in
He seems distracted and I know just what is going to happen next

Before his first step, he's off again

TDoT(28): What would you do if you were pregnant?

Urm, well, that's an interesting one for me. If The Tragedy had never happened, well, then, I would eat well, not drink, take my supplements and grow the little thing as best I could. Then I'd have it and adore it and bring it up to be the best person it could be. If I'd gone along with my youthfully rose-tinted vision of yesteryear, I'd be having four more to join it.

That, however, was not meant to be.

What would I do now? I'd be devastated by having to make that decision. To carry through with a high-risk pregnancy, not knowing if everything was going alright, putting myself and the baby in danger?

I am completely pro-choice when it comes to abortion, this would not be a moral decision from that point-of-view. I think women have the right to choose not to have a baby (preferrably before conceiving, but let's face it, accidents happen) and to make informed decisions on whether or not they are physically/mentally/financially able to bring another child into the world.

Stepping down from the soap box again.

For me? I, honestly, don't have an answer. And I hope to never have to have one.

TDoT(16): Someone or something you definitely could live without

I could happily live without helplessness. I've mentioned it before, my intense dislike of it in others, and now my having it thrust on me, unasked for, unwanted, hated, but immovable. I am the type who, if something needs doing, I like to get it done. I was a light bulb-changer, a toilet roll thrower away, a cook dinnerer.

It changed in a matter of seconds, a crushing sound of metal, some thorn trees. And I could definitely live without it.

30 Days of Truth: Day 1

Thirty Days of Truth

Day 1: Something you hate about yourself.

That I can’t walk, or swim in the sea, or dance about wildly, like I used to. I don’t mention it on here often. Well, surreptiously or cryptically I do, but that’s not what this blog is about and I don’t want it to become about that either, so it won’t. For anyone who is confused and wants to read the whole sorry story, go to The Tragedy Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4. For this prompt, though, I must. It’s just that, when I saw this first 30 Days of Truth topic, it was the first thing I thought of. And I promised myself I’d try to write about the first thing that came to mind.

So, yes, I hate not jumping out of bed in the morning to have a shower, walk down the passage, make some tea. I hate not being able to drive down to the seaside, willy-nilly, just because I feel like it. To feel the sand between my toes, to body surf in the frizzing, frothy waves. Swimming. I hate not feeling water over my entire body, that weightlessness. I hate never being alone. And I hate feeling alone.

And I hate that I can’t do anything about it. Helplessness has always been way up there on my list of things I don’t like. I have always been particularly intolerant of people who insist on acting helpless. Maybe this is my lesson?

I could go on but it’s all the same stuff I hate not being able to do, both the everyday and the not-so-everyday. So I’ll stop it just there because it opens the biggest, blackest hole in me that makes me frightened. And I hate that.

Heartbroken

I have wondered this before, and wondered it again this morning as the mist swirled and twirled about me, playing hide-and-go-seek with the trees along the river. Does The Weatherman change the weather according to my state of mind? While I realise it is a preposterous thought that the entire City Beneath the Mountain's weather is dependent on li'l ol' Shiny's mood, but it's just, well, very coincidental.

I have a lot on my mind, and it's twirling and swirling and storming and pouring and blowing about, this way and that, directionless. One minute I feel okay, the next I feel like it's all too much and I'm fucking it up and I'm getting fucked up. Excuse my sailor-like language, but I can find nothing better to describe this. My mother would be horrified.

I keep reassuring myself that this is just life, and that I can do this. I can get over the hurdles (even if I have to do that at a crawl, using my teeth and nails), that the good bits of life WAY outnumber the crap bits. And they do, I know they do. Just sometimes, it all seems so difficult.

And it's at those times that I really question stuff and my frustration feels insurmountable. All I want to do is walk along a deserted beach, salty wind and the frothy crashing of waves my only companions. A dip into the effervescence, a little body-surfing, allowing the bubbles to kiss every part of my skin and the ocean vapours to infuse my lungs, washing away those swirling mind mists, clearing the air. Being the real me.

But I can't. And it breaks my heart.

A momentous 200th post, Partly Part 4

I realised the other day that my ‘Tragedy’ story is far from finished when Allie, well, told me so! It’s a long story but, I guess, the thing that I haven’t reached yet, in the telling of it, is the crunch.

You see, while I spoke in Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 about the acute happenings (and that story is far from finished) of that fateful day in 1996, I didn’t get to the bottom line. So, because this is my 200th post, I’m skipping to the last page of that book, and I’ll fill in the rest, um, sometime later. Deep breath.

I am paralysed. Quadriplegic. I am in a wheelchair. I can move my arms, but not my fingers. I can move my shoulders, but not my legs. I can feel from a line just above my boobs and up, but nothing below that. I need help with most things.

However,

I can breathe. I can think. I can speak. I can see, and smell, and hear. I can love. And I do.

I have avoided this blog post for all this time maybe because I wanted to keep my head buried in the sand. I don’t think that’s it, though. It was (and is) more the fact that, in my everyday dealings with people, the wheelchair is the first thing they see (and forgive me, I am generalising hugely here). Before they see me, they see the chair and, often, they miss me completely. Here, though, on this page, I am seen. Just me.

It’s like blogs take away the pretty/ugly/scary/torn and broken cover of the book (which we all share, as humanity, just to different degrees and in different ways) and just reveal the beautifully intricate stories inside, without the exterior distractions. It’s like going straight into people’s souls. Thus, my turmoils with the anonymity of it all.

I have never wanted this blog to be a record of my paralysis, or to be stories of the struggles (and happinesses etc) of The L’il Wheelchair Girl (as my friend SJ refers to me), so I’ve not said anything. That’s not what this blog is about. I may, or may not mention it again. It’s part of me, though, and now seems the right time to just be honest. It may explain some of my more cryptic posts. Or not.

I wonder if I should be feeling as if I just took off my skin and dumped it in the corner, revealing my soul beneath, exposed and raw?

Melancholy

It's insipiddly grey. Not even. It's invisible, but grey, as it creeps slowly toward me, pushing its' foul breath into my space... a warning about which I can do nothing. I can feel it coming, my heart fills with tears and becomes squelchy and small as I try to flee from it and slam doors in its' face, but I am rooted to the spot. No matter how hard I try, my legs are leaden, my feet concrete, it will get me, again.

I fill a day with the inane tasks of life, feign jollity on the phone, take another sip of beer and smile too much, wrap myself in a false sense of okay. But back home, it's dark outside, and it's dark in here too, and my heart clenches more, as I try to stop my mind from going there, into those murky recesses, but the door has swung open, I heard it's ominous Hollywood-horror-style squeak, and I know nothing will take this away. I'm in it. And stuck. It's too late this time to turn my back on it. It's tendrils are around my neck.

Do you think, perhaps, I'm a little melancholy today?

The Tragedy, Part 3

So I began the convoluted and disjointed tale of my tragedy a couple of months ago (Part 1 and Part 2 are here, and there). And then I stopped. Not because it was causing me great pain or drama, but because I ran out of steam to tell it. And I didn't get very far, and I am now making myself get back to it. Thus far, we crashed in the middle of nowhere on a hot summer's day and I had done a sterling job of breaking my neck and squelching my spinal cord. People stopped, angels flew over (or were they vultures?), the sun looked at us despairingly from her perch in the vast Karoo sky, and I landed up in ICU at a hospital in Bigger Town.

We transferred from Small Town to Bigger Town in a rickety ambulance. The Small Town hospital had an air of dusty despondency about it, unlike the big private hospital in Bigger Town (about 3 hours away) at which I found myself. Wheeling down the corridor on arrival I was surprised to notice tinsel and shiny red and gold balls attached to the ceiling of the passage... Christmas.

I was met there by my mother's university friend (and Godmother to my sister) who lived in the university town. My mother had phoned her with the news and she rushed to meet me and be with me until my mother arrived (she had to fly down). I remember feeling relieved to see her familiar face.

I'm trying really hard here to remember my thoughts and feelings but I think I've left it too long. I feel like I'm going to make them up, as if I'm thinking now, how all that whirl of chaos and drama would make me feel if it were happening to me now but I'm a different person, surely? Perhaps not.

At this juncture, though, it was just whirlwind. I was X-rayed from head to foot because I couldn't feel anything. I knew full well that I couldn't because every doctor/nurse/tea lady who came into my room seemed to have a pointy instrument with which they prodded me, starting at my feet and moving up, asking at 5-secondly intervals: "Can you feel that?" Right up until my upper chest... then I could feel it, bloody hell. And they kept telling me to move my foot/leg/hip. I couldn't.

I was put in ICU with two other people - a man who complained incessantly of being uncomfortable and a woman who, in hindsight, I think must've been psychotic. I was on morphine, it all seemed fine, if a bit noisy. I love morphine, just so you know.

My mother arrived. She flew, while my father drove below her in the direction of us, he would sleep over in a small dusty town and change direction when he heard I was to be airlifted out of there, heading toward the City Beneath the Mountain, to which I was transferred.

I don't remember much from that first night, a combination of shock and drugs, I'm sure. I just remember waking repeatedly to the discomfort of the man in the next bed, the wailing of the psychotic woman, and the beeping and disturbingly-human-like sounds of the ECG and ventilator machines. Somebody there must've been on a ventilator.

Next day I was airlifted to The City Beneath the Mountain, where my sister waited anxiously.

I need to stop there. Like I said, disjointed, I apologise.

Better disjointed and flowing, than buried deep within, right?

The Tragedy, Part 2

So where was I? I started Part 1 and then found myself clamming up again, but I am going to open up my little clammy shell with my little clammy-shell-opener-thingy. It's not an easy thing to do I'm afraid, it's a bloody tight little clammy shell, but I think it's a good thing to do, hopefully cathartic, and hopefully not too tedious for any of you reading this. It's a disjointed story, the story of The Tragedy, mostly because I've never managed to write it down or sort it into any order. Maybe because it has no order.

This bit is about the hospital, I think. I plan on it being about the hospital but you never know where it'll go. Being in hospital is just not fun. Being in hospital for three solid months is like hell on earth. I was transferred from Small Town hospital to Big Town hospital, where I spent a night, then airlifted to The City Beneath the Mountain hospital where I spent three nights and then to another hospital, which was to be my abode for the next four months, according to the doctor. I made it three months, I was determined (and if I'd stayed any longer I may well have jumped out of the fifth floor window, if I could've... the irony.)

Ok, no, the details, I need to get out the details. This may not, yet be about hospitals. I need to go back to the car, being in the car, waiting for the ambulance. Somebody gave me a sip of coke, through a straw. It was hot, remember, and we were in the middle of the Karoo, waiting as the sun got higher and higher. The woman who gave me the coke spoke to me, gently, telling me about her Tragedy - how she'd broken her neck years before, but not completely, and recovered perfectly. I wondered at the time why she was telling me that story, not for a second thinking my neck could also be broken, just there, at the back of my head.

The car had been filled to the brim with my and D's earthly belongings - four years of university life snuggly packed in the back . In the accident our lives had flown out, scattered about on the dusty red sand between the thorn trees that had also flung their arms into the car, embracing me and planting their thorns all over me (we discovered later). Two Karoo farmers on their way to play cricket in the Tiny Town a bit further down the road stopped too and I heard them trying to gather our scattered belongings, including a large plastic dinosaur, Leonard, who I'd purloined from my First Love's younger brother. They told me they'd 'put him out to pasture' on that lovely red sand (Leonard the dinosaur, not First Loves little brother).

There are so many characters in this story, people I'd not thought of, and this is still within the first two hours. This story really may take a long time. I'm glad I'm starting, I think. Those people, the nameless ones who stopped, I hope that Karma has blessed them with all sorts of good things. They were all so nice. A good reminder of the value of stopping, and helping. I'd love to be able to write them a letter, send them bunch of lillies, if I knew who they were.

The farmer whose farm we had so rudely, and without invitation, landed on, apparently took all of our wordly belongings and kept them safe until somebody (who was it, I wonder?) collected them for us. I had a mirror in there, it didn't break.

And then M, the guy from our university who I didn't know well. I think D knew him quite well. Anyway, it's beside the point. He was there, and he stayed with us, and came with us to the hospital and was, I guess, our own little angel, keeping us together as we unknowingly fell apart, because, really, I guess, I was already starting to unravel at that point, I just didn't realise. Or was I? I was still so sure of everything. Oy, this is all-over-the-place.

The ambulance arrived eventually, from Tiny Town with a fabulous paramedic man, who also, if I remember correctly, was meant to be in the cricket match (I wonder if they still had the match). I got bundled onto a hard wooden board with a neck brace and put into the back of the ambulance. Up until that point I had been obsessively superstitious about 'crossing my fingers and touching my toes hoping to never go in one of those' everytime I'd seen an ambulance... I've stopped that now.

I have to stop this now, too. This disjointed tale. I wonder if it makes any sense at all?

The Tragedy, Part 1, and 100th post

This is my 100th post. Shoo. Who would've thought I'd manage to keep it up this long? My little practice pad for writing. If it was on real paper, I'd have used maybe two exercise books, or even three, depending on how many pages in each, and how big I wrote, and if I started each entry on a new page or not, and... Let me stop there... My 100th post should surely not just be filled with arbitrary drivel? Oh, wait, maybe that's what my blog is?

I've had fun though. It's freaked me out (the privacy thing) and made me laugh (people can be so funny) and provided an outlet for a whole lot and continues to make me write, which was the whole point. I am nowhere near to writing as openly as I had wished, but I think perhaps that is not a bad thing. People know about the blog now and it's taken on a different notion. There are still stories I need to tell, and keep promising, and I'll keep doing that. Perhaps that is what I should use this, 100th, blog for. The Tragedy story which I keep promising.

It was a perfect December day. The sky above the Karoo through which we drove was brilliant, clear blue and the sun was hot, despite it being early morning. My mind was filled with mixed emotions, I was on the brink of something huge and new. I didn't know then, how huge and different.

You see, we were driving away from university, for the last time. Four years of learning (and by that I mean so much more than just acadaemia). The academics were peripheral to, well, the learning to live - coming into one's own... fucking up, picking oneself up (or being picked up by friends) and just being filled with life. Unencumbered freedom. We did as we pleased. We loved without caution, we played without trepidation. It was an incredible time.

And, at this point, on the 1st of December 1996, it had come to an end. I was indescribably sad to be leaving behind friends, and that life, but exhilirated by my plans - to visit my boyfriend in Zimbabwe and then move to The City Beneath the Mountain, into a house with him and another friend to start our time in the Real World for a year before I joined those varsity friends overseas to travel. My youth-tinted plan included those travels 'until I was done', at which point I'd come home, pregnant. With, or without father of said child. I wanted five.

But the universe had other plans. At around 9am, in the Karoo (strangely a place I have always, and still do, love... my heart always clenches and then breathes out a huge pleasurable sigh when I go there), under that hot blue sky, we crashed. We just went off the road, mid-conversation, Iggy Pop's 'Lust for Life' playing (I am still unsure if that is true, but in my head, that's the story, and I'm sticking to it). We rolled, it was noisy, glass crashed and metal ripped, over some thorn trees and came to a stop many metres off the road. And then there was a hot silence.

I remember seeing blood on the windscreen next to the rear view mirror. I was lying with my head on D's arm, halfway across the seat. I moved my right hand. Once. And then it wouldn't move again. She was (unsurprisingly) hysterical. I have a knack of going completely calm in stressful situations (this is, sometimes, not a good thing... like when a shelf of books is about to fall and I calmy say, after thinking for a few seconds: "Oh dear, look, those books are going to smash that lovely vase" by which stage the vase is being swept into a dustpan. On this occassion, however, it was a good thing). I got her to get out of the car. She couldn't see the road. I got her to keep turning slowly until she could see a car and then go there and get help.

We were in the middle of nowhere. People stopped. They were wonderful. A guy from Varsity, who we knew, stopped. He was even more wonderful (I still want to thank him for that). It was a long time, with lots of people, before the ambulance came. I remember sipping coke through a straw and it getting hotter and hotter. I also remember thinking that I must've broken both my legs and arms, and calculating that I would be fine by our Graduation, the next April. Graduation was a big thing at our varsity - one last big bash.

And then there was a whirlwind of ambulances, hospitals, a call to my parents (I told them I was fine, the doctor took the phone and told them to come), transferred from Small Town to Bigger Town (where my mother met me) and then airlifted to The City beneath the Mountain. In the Bigger Town, apparently (I heard this a long, long time later), a nasty nurse in the ICU informed my mother, alone, in the early hours of the morning, that, more-than-likely, I would never walk again. She did not tell me, of course. I was to find out a couple of days later.

So, yes, it turned out, that after spending 21 years on this earth without breaking anything (not even a finger), when I did break something, I did it oh-so-properly. I broke my neck. And really well too. The doctors said my spinal cord inside the vertebrae that I broke was well and truly mushed.

Gosh, this tragedy story is longer than I anticipated. And sounds a bit soap opera-ish. I'm prone to drama. It's my thing. Well, at least, one of them. Fuck, I've finally written this. Now, do I click on Publish Post? As is obvious, this is just the beginning of the story, but that was surprisingly draining, and I think I shall leave it there.

And anyway, isn't it time to crack open the champagne and celebrate 100 posts?

Disturbing dreams and tragedies

I awoke out of an inappropriate dream this morning. Very, very. I can’t tell it here, lest I get locked up in a very tight white jacket. Let me just say that it was an extremely disturbing mix of adult sexuality and childhood naivete and involved somebody, well not unexpected, not even unsuitable (he'd probably be the most suitable, if he were present), but just, kind of weird feeling. I am SO not ready to acknowledge those sub-conscious thoughts. Yet. Moving on swiftly.

Those monstrous mosquitoes I spoke about before? Yes, well, they’re thriving. Despite the fact that The BFF came over to play last night and killed approximately four thousand two hundred and twenty six (give or take a couple), after he left, the rest of the family (and boy, do those guys know how to breed) came out to play.

The Pond (she who is so wise about sore wings, and vodka) has moved back into my house for two months between leases and I was (quite cruelly I realise, but dire circumstances excuse such behaviour) hoping her sweet blood would draw the bastards away from my room, and to hers. Not happening.

Needless to say, I had plenty of thinking time. So I got to thinking about tragedies (as one does in the dead of night, while listening to Beethoven’s 4th being buzzed at you by a choir of mounstrous mosquitoes, or was it Nine Inch Nails? I can’t be sure ). Not like in the Shakespeare version, but more the common garden version. Not that tragedies could ever be ‘common garden’ really, but you get what I’m saying.

So I got to wondering if each of us gets to experience one great tragedy in our lives or some people get away with none. I suppose it’s all in the context. What’s a tragedy for one person is not really a tragedy for another. I’ve had mine already (well I hope I don’t have another big one, that one was enough for me). I broke, literally and a bit later figuratively and I still can’t tell you which of those was worse. I’m not sure I’m completely fixed yet. Okay, that’s a lie. That sentence order is wrong. I’m completely sure I’m not yet fixed. Hmm, this is a longer story than I thought. Let me leave that one there.

There was also some discussion last night on the fact that, in this life, you may be paying for the sins of previous lives or those of your ancestors, which could explain hardships (and tragedies). I struggle with this concept. I am of the belief that, when we die, our souls split up into tiny silvery pieces that fly about and land themselves in everybody we’ve ever known or touched. That’s how our characters build as we get older.

I just don’t like the idea that what I do wrong now will have to be paid for by my ancestors or future lives. It seems unfair, and horrible. So I think I’ll stick to my philosophy for now.

I still wonder though, if some people are lucky enough to get away tragedy-free?