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...a long, long way from home
That's from an old spiritual...I was sick for a while (two weeks? three weeks? I have no idea) and that song was going through my head throughout, way too much. A version of the old Hank Williams song, "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry," was in heavy rotation, too, but using it as the title to my post smacks a little too much of self-pity and that's not quite where I have been lately or certainly where I am right now.
I guess it came from being forced to get off the merry-go-round for a few beats too many, in this case by sickness (as usual, some weird and exotic unnamed set of maladies...I have a strong immune system, but when I really get sick it's inevitably a doozie and almost always ends up on my medical records as 'idiopathic,' the medical term for "we have no f***ing idea what this is"). As long as I kept up my full-speed-ahead schedule of work and all that is associated with it, I was okay. I could push to the corners of my mental vision the bigger-picture concerns and issues (and regrets) that might otherwise interminably plague what little sleep I typically get. Not worries in the short term -- I'm generally optimistic in that I think things will always work out -- but larger-scale things: everything from wondering the when and if of romantic love and children/marriage/etc and all that goes with it (that is, indeed, a biggie, and the source of the greatest imbalance in my life) to inevitable long-term money worries (right now I'm positively raking in the semolians, at last, but my job security is close to zero) to thoughts surrounding the primary career that I walked away from for this indefinite hiatus to thinking how nice it'd be to actually own a place of my own and how the hell I was going to do that to more immediate pragmatic concerns such as most of my stuff being in storage in another state and how I was going to separate and consolidate it...all sorts of stuff, large and small, that I try not to dwell on too much.
I'm fairly convinced of my indestructibility. I've been through some pretty hairy situations -- not a war, like some, but some dicey situations, nevertheless -- and if I was given to particular ideas of divine intervention I'd not hesitate to claim that Someone was looking out for me. But sometimes I wonder and I worry what might happen when I no longer feel that invisible light around me, or whatever it is that has my innermost self just knowing I will be okay even when all evidence points to the contrary. What'll happen when I no longer feel that I've still got much yet to do and many years ahead of me? What if I'm not Superman any more? This sickness had me wondering, for just a little while. It didn't help that I'm the same age Elvis was when he died and that, dosed up on barbiturates and painkillers (they did a number on me...I pretty much eschew any kind of medication and haven't had a painkiller since a serious motorcycle crash 22 years ago, and those didn't work on me at all) and alone in a darkened room with the only light the flickering of my TV, I began to get a sense of what it must have been like to be someone like that who was, at heart and at odds with his public image, so profoundly alone and lost. I do my best to give people a sense of the guy, as my job, but I don't ever want to take that particular impersonation to its extreme conclusion. I'm off those drugs now, but for a while I was in the Twilight Zone (and I welcomed it...the pain it replaced was not only unpleasant, inherently, but driving me nuts with its insistence). I still have zero appetite and seem to have totally lost the feeling of being hungry, even though at least now my stomach has expanded back to the point at which I can eat a moderate amount of food even if I don't feel the need...I thought I'd be experiencing hunger pangs by now, but I suppose my body will let me know what it needs and when it needs it. Kinda cool, really, because I was starting to steadily lose weight again, anyway, and now -- after ditching all the weight I gained the past few months and then some -- even halfway monitoring my diet and eating the tons of fiber I favor should at last have me back to my long-absent optimal fighting weight by February. There's always a bright side, I suppose.
Most of all, I guess, being sick, holed up in my room like some kind of Howard Hughes figure, it was easy to feel cut off and alone. Completely alone. I'm not, of course -- PMs here on DU, alone, prove that, and I do have extended family (which is why I ended up at the doctor for the first time in years...they, thankfully, insisted they take me there) and my work partner here for me -- but it's easy enough to feel so utterly alone, day after day in a darkened room. I didn't contact any of my immediate family, overseas, because I didn't want them to worry from afar. Besides, I couldn't write, couldn't read...couldn't really do anything except watch movies, sometimes phasing in and out of consciousness throughout. The only reference point I had was the little schedule I made up (during a more lucid moment) for my various doses, knowing that there was no way I'd keep them straight otherwise. My nuclear family, the family I grew up in, is scattered across three continents. I'm the only one on this continent. It's been that way a long time, over a third of my life. I'm not a motherless child, but sometimes I truly do feel a long, long way from home. And sometimes it's worse than that: I have no idea where 'home' is any more.
And, as is so often the case when you're at a low of that kind, now and then little reminders of loves lost and loves that never were will stand out like blood on snow and conspire to drive you to the deepest emotional abyss. I didn't let them take me while I was trapped in my bed, but they've grabbed me quite forcefully a time or two over the past few months when I've made the mistake of stopping or slowing my perpetual motion. Part of me wanted them to take me down, where I might nearly drown in the pain of past heartbreak but at least have a few precious memories of happier moments to grab on to, illusion though they may now be; the rest of me, though, knew there's no more sure route to self-destruction than to go to that place, to that Heartbreak Hotel. That song, "Heartbreak Hotel," was inspired by a suicide note that read "I walk a lonely street." Many of us do, and some of us seem to have walked that street our whole lives, but we don't have to walk it to the same conclusion. We can only save ourselves. Further, only we can save ourselves.
But, in the end, it all passes like a squall on the ocean. The last few days have been very, very good, and not just in terms of physical symptoms. Maybe it's not all clear sailing ahead, and maybe I've lost the chart and the course I once plotted upon it, but I've still got my compass and I am a good sailor. There are always new charts. And I am damned unsinkable.
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Take better care of yourself, dammit. And you know the number, call when you need to know you're not alone in the world.
