Esmé Weijun Wang

Photo by Chris

I woke up this morning feeling overwhelmed.

A lot of it had to do with the fact that I had fallen asleep at around 3 PM-4 PM yesterday and woke up at 7 AM this morning, due to a cold that I’d been staving off (from Chris, who is still dealing with the cold after weeks of having one) while recovering from my cyst rupture and ER stays, and this cold somehow decided to take advantage of my compromised immune system sometime on Friday, when I was supposed to go to my uncle’s house for our Thanksgiving dinner. I woke up today feeling confused; my throat burned; I hadn’t eaten since 1:30 PM yesterday and had no appetite. I picked up my phone in bed and texted my supervisor at work. I checked my email, which was brimming both with people who were concerned by me and people whom I am concerned for, who are having serious life problems that I can pretty much do nothing about.

All of this before I got out of bed.

The fog is incredibly thick today. Twin Peaks and Sutro Tower are obliterated by white. My supervisor texted me back. Don’t worry about working from home today, she said. Just take the day off.

The day off. Replenish, regrow, recover.

2011

2011

2001

I was being discharged from the emergency room on Monday after being in there for about four hours. I was chatting with the pharmacist, when suddenly I felt really hot. I was sweating and shaking and I thought I was going to vomit.

I think something’s wrong, I said, but it came out slurred, and I slumped over onto the counter.

The pharmacist and Chris somehow got me to sit in one of the chairs, where I could hear Chris say (at this point I was having trouble keeping my eyes open or my head up or really having trouble doing anything with my limbs at all), She’s really cold, she’s really clammy, and my head was lolling to the side.

Open your eyes, look at me, look at me, he said. I opened my eyes and closed them again, he grabbed my head and held it straight, he said, Hey, hey, stay awake, look at me.

Someone asked, Do we need to call a code? Do I need to call a code?

Whaaaaaaat’s haaaaaappppennnnninggggggg, I said.

I was on the floor.

Do you know where you are. Suddenly there were nurses and doctors everywhere. At least, this is what I’m told, because I had my eyes closed and my mouth was hanging open for some reason.

I said, I’m in… the hossssspitallllll.

After they got me on a stretcher by rolling me onto a blanket, I returned to Room 8, which is where I had been before. Chris kept telling every new doctor about everything that had happened. I didn’t say much. A nurse-in-training came in to put in a new IV. Blood squirted everywhere.

I mumbled, It’s good to practice on a semi-unconscious person.

Everyone laughed.

I want everyone to like me, though I don’t like everyone, and am in fact not fond of most people. I want everyone I care about to be happy all of the time. I want the people I love to never be upset with me. I want to be thinner, and I want to not care about being thinner. I want to stop using the words “bad” and “good” and “should” and “can’t.” I want to spend less time feeling bad. I want to be able to sit with emotional discomfort. I want to be grateful. I want to let this be enough. I want absolution of sins to feel real. I want someone to be on call for me whenever I am upset, which is a lot of the time. I want to grow up. I want to feel less fragile. I want to write my second novel about marriage. I want to be a real girl.

October 3, 2003:
”Do you think I’m a bad person?”
”I can’t answer that, especially not as you’re leaving.”
”But I want to know – do you think I’m a bad person.”
”Because of the shoplifting?”
”Because.”
”I don’t answer questions like that, especially not as you’re leaving. I’d have to find out what you meant by that.”
”But we can’t just leave it here, I have to know or I’m going to cry.”
”I can’t.”
”But what will I do?”
”I guess you’ll cry. Good luck with your midterms.”

Yesterday my brother asked me if I’d heard anything about my cat, Lena. I said no. She’s been gone for a month, he said. She hadn’t been greeting him at the garage door, not coming and meowing for food — he’d been caring for her in my parents’ absence — he said, I looked everywhere. She’s just gone.

Lena turned 13 this October.

During one of the worst depressions of my life, my mother suggested that I adopt a cat for companionship. This led to my mother, my brother, and I going to a cat rescue, where we saw two gorgeous kittens — six months old, each — waiting to go home with someone. This was in 1999.

My cat, the orange-and-white one, was Lena; the black-and-white one was my brother’s, and he named her Ally. Ally and Lena had distinctively different personalities; while Ally was impish and did things like climb inside my father’s massage chair, Lena kept to her favorite places, and loved to cuddle and purr.

I didn’t know at the time that I was horribly allergic to cats, but I discovered this fact pretty quickly. Lena and Ally went from being indoor cats to being indoor/outdoor cats. Ally died of liver failure when she was two years old. Lena, traumatized, peed all over the house for a while, and then she, like the rest of us, moved on.

Here are some things that I remember about Lena. She was never unkempt or ungroomed, even in her old age. Visitors to my parents’ house always remarked that she was one of the most beautiful cats they’d ever seen, and my mother insisted that she was the most beautiful cat she’d ever seen. Up until a few months ago, she’d still kill and bring squirrels, rats, mice, and lizards to the front door. Look at this, she seemed to be saying. Look at me.

She had ridiculously soft fur.

I don’t know where she is, but I hope she comes home.

A few days ago I looked at my manuscript, the title of which is now Lamentations: A Novel, and had a long talk with H about what to do next. The final part, which had exhausted me in the writing of it, and which I couldn’t seem to fix on my own.

It sounds like you want to send it, H said.

So I looked at the 500-plus paged document, changed the font and font size and made it single-spaced, thus bringing it to a reasonable length, and ordered a copy to be printed and bound to H’s exact specifications. It should make it to her on November 11, a Friday. She’ll be the first reader to absorb it in its entirety, unless Chris finishes it first, and in the meantime I can’t look at it. If I look at it I’ll see things that I want to change, down to the most minute verb changes, and what I need right now is a big-picture view.

But in the meantime, what do I do with myself.

Last night I read the entirety of Blue Nights, the Didion memoir, on the sofa when I was having insomnia and Chris was safely tucked in bed. Blue Nights is about death, mortality, loss. It is crueler than The Year of Magical Thinking. I found it necessary and frightening.

I spend far more time worrying about the death of my loved ones than my own death.

If you look at my bookshelf of most recently read books as of late, you’ll see titles like the following: Dusk, Last Night, The Getaway Car, The Runaway, Blue Nights, Last Night, Death in the Family.

It’s hard for me to find books that I believe in, lately. I want my socks to be knocked off or I don’t want to read at all. It seems selfish, perhaps, but I want the time that I spent reading Freedom back, I want the time that I spent reading (redacted) back, I want the time that I spent reading Mortals back (and Mating is one of my very favorite books). Lately I’ve been reading Raise High the Roofbeams, Carpenters/Seymour over and over, which is my equivalent of taking a hot bath or getting a massage. For some reason, that particular book comforts me more than any other book I know. I know that the day I don’t feel a little bit comforted by reading that book is the day that I need to check myself into the Tollhaus.

Again, what do I do with myself.

I bought an instant camera. Chris suggested that I avoid fiction altogether for a while. I’ve been having a bout of malaise about my fiction lately. Perhaps it’s post-partum from delivering Lamentations and not knowing where it’s going to go next, but my usual brio about how goddamn brilliant I am has been replaced lately by the old, eternal craving for external validation, and pretty much no amount of external validation is enough for me right now. Rejections line the walls. I hold off on sending things off because I have nothing to send, only this half-formed baby that isn’t ready to meet and greet. But back to the instant camera. Maybe it’s time to do something entirely different for a while. You may have noticed, or perhaps not, if you read this blog via RSS feed, that I pulled a little makeover.

Last night Chris and I went to see Wild Flag at the Great American Music Hall after not seeing a live show in ages, and it was beautifully nostalgic and I danced in the balcony and fell in love with Carrie all over again, but what I really wanted to see was Mary Timony, who was like some kind of rock goddess. In 1997 she had a page in SPIN magazine; she was wearing hot pink leather pants and I decided that I also wanted hot pink leather pants more than anything, because she looked so incredibly sexy and ultra-cool that it blew my 13-year-old mind. (I tried to find a picture of Mary Timony in these amazing pants to show you here, but was not successful.) She did fantastic high kicks with her long legs. I told Chris I would play him Dirt of Luck this weekend, and when he asked what Helium sounded like, I said, Magical, with no irony. Mary Timony has a magical voice.

Other things that I’ve been doing include drinking smoothies in the San Francisco winter, wearing my extra-thick leggings that enabled me to wear skirts and dresses through two Michigan winters and are just as good here, trying to make plans for two mini-residencies in the next few months.

And that is what my life is, that is how my days go by. I am trying to be my own, ever-present best friend.