Transitory Thoughts

Those fleeting moments of joy that sneak up on you and overtake you just the same: 

Driving down a sunny backroad while Kings of Leon thrums a swampy soundtrack 

Stepping outside as the summer rainstorm begins and the hot asphalt releases its cement scent

What does it take to transform one’s despair? I exercise and I shed sadness like sweat while the anger builds, nascent as a fetus in my belly. I hold myself tightly wound and exit the orbits of people nearby, people I love who I will only push away if I allow myself to open. I want to bloom like the camellias, then the lilacs, now the rhododendrons and azaleas, and soon even the finicky roses will take their turn on the grand stage of Spring. Instead I watch, immobilized and tight-lipped, pushing from the inside yet emerging stillborn.

In my car, hot, stuck to the leather seat while half my body sunbathes and the other grows jealous in the shade. I’m at Piper’s Lagoon. Frustrated children create further anarchy while parents, angelic in their exasperated patience, do all they can to restore a semblance of normalcy. As usual, the left side of my head, the same side that basks in the sun like a gilded peony, throbs from my neck to my lower jaw. I’ve somehow acclimatized to these sinister migraines, as one does when living with a loud tenant roughly 20 of the 30 days of the month. Give or take. Always take. 

On a good day, the pain reminds me of how far in my hypochondriac path I’ve traversed: not just a month ago, I was crying hot tears in the emergency room with the recycled belief in my own impending doom by aneurysm. I’ve since integrated all my ER visits into one lucid chunk and deduced the following: that they all end with me knowing more about *me*, my body, than many physicians who take on my case file: an exhausting, polychromatic bag of tricks. And also, why, in moments of such uncertainty and pain, must I give my power away by buying my own panic? Without fail, I speak lucidly with ER doctors such that, no matter how severe my symptoms, any nascent threat of a neurological event is simply wiped from the table of possibility like bacteria in the face of isopropyl alcohol: 70%. 

When I was five, my dad familiarized me with Hale Bopp, the largest comet to come into earth’s neck-of-the-woods for decades. After dinner, on particularly balmy May nights, he would lift me onto the lower (safe) ledge of the iron deck railing, painted milk chocolate brown, and point out the proximity of Hale Bopp. I still recall how he, with his Alabama accent, pronounced such an academically iterated name: “Hay-ell Bawp.” Jovial and light. Nothing to fear at all in that name, only something to watch with awe. With trust. A product of the universe which was to be filtered through my father’s honey drawl, a medicine the likes of which I’ll never know again.