9

Wrap Your Troubles In Dreams

Suggested listening: “Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams,” by Nico

The trip to Houston is exhausting. My body is surviving by way of nervous anxiety and adrenaline; combated by the drug cocktail I am currently prescribed. Having been advised within the last twelve hours on the risks of my craniotomy by the man who will be performing it, my drained brain is clinging to life as the heavy reality further sets in on the long road home. I am reminded of the cliché that people often refer to when describing something that is not nor should be construed as complex by saying, “well, it isn’t brain surgery.” Well, in my case it actually is.

It would be untruthful for me to say that I am in no way absolutely petrified by this. Though confident in Dr. Prahbu’s expertise and confident that my time is not yet due, I do recognize that my surgery is complicated and complex and the strong possibility exists that a number of things could go terribly wrong. It is not lost on me that this very well could be my last week on Earth.

Thursday, May 17^th, 2012

I am looking forward to being back at home and back to my norm, even though my normal is in no way the same as it once was, and presumably will never be again. When walking up the steps to my house on Cortez in the late afternoon, I become more saddened knowing that the boy I was seeing and living with for a little under one year hit me in a drunken stupor and will no longer be there; well knowing that this is simply my issue with codependency rearing its hideous head.

The house is empty when I arrive, and within my first few steps past the front door I begin to notice that things seem to be out of place; the house is not the way that I left it. The kitchen in the very back of the house is littered with dishes piled high in the sink and dirty pots and pans cover all four burners on the stove. There is half-eaten food on my mod black and white ceramic plates. Flies are perched on the lips of warm beer bottles that are scattered across every available surface. I even find a couple of red wine ring stains on the white top of my tulip table. The door to the back porch is not only unlocked, but slightly ajar where I find more of the same. Glass beer bottles precariously line the full length of the wooden banisters of the hunter green painted wooden side porch. Not only is there food rotting out in the heat of the sun in the aluminum trays that it was left in, but there are additional trays filled with burnt out charcoal atop my 1950s metal plant stand that has cleverly been made into a makeshift barbeque pit. For the third time today tears well up in my eyes as I stand surrounded by the blatant disrespect of my things and our shared space.

Far too exhausted to muster up any anger and too drained to address the mess, like a mother to a child I relay the message to Nicole by phone that she needs to clean up the mess that is result of a party that she had, and that I was not in attendance before retreating to my bedroom for some much needed time alone in my shell.

Saturday, May 19^th, 2012

Having only been home for a little more than a day, much to my dismay I will be returning to Houston tomorrow for an unknown amount of time. In preparation, Judy has booked a suite for the entire week at a Staybridge Inn in Houston’s Med Center, which certainly won’t be anything like the fanciful Hotel Zaza. The suite, however, is furnished with a kitchen and can accommodate my entire family, which includes my mother as well as my three sisters: Ellen, Raegan and Shannon, who all plan to visit intermittently during the week.

Alone in my bedroom at Cortez Street listening to Vintage Violence by John Cale, I pack for the week ahead figuring it is a bit of a waste seeing as a hospital gown, in effect, will get the most wear. I do not even want to begin to imagine what my head is going to look like by the end of next week, but feel that never before has there been a more significant time in my life to bring out my fifteen-year collection of vintage scarves. In my wishful thinking, nearly thirty minutes come to pass before going on to pack well more than a week worth of scarves along with multiple pairs of shoes that will most definitively get no use; but I do not know anyone that would ever go as far to say that I am one to pack lightly.

The message I relayed to Nicole seems to have fallen on deaf ears. Although a small bathroom is the only thing separating our two bedrooms on the second floor of our house, she makes a point of staying locked in hers to avoid me as well as the mess that she and her party guests created all day, still rendering the kitchen practically useless.

I finally come face to face with her in the hallway as she is leaving the bathroom. I sarcastically ask her if “she was expecting a visit from the maid today,” referring to myself. I figure that she knows me well enough to know that I am the type to clean the dirty kitchen out of my own neuroses for cleanliness when an absolutely asinine argument on her part ensues. When she ends her argument by accusing me of, “acting like such a bitch lately,” I smile, shake my head, and let out a sigh to end all sighs. After all that I have been through these past few weeks, I make the split decision to cut my losses. She has proven to me with her moronic, selfish comment just days before and her hideous display while I was away at the hospital that this is not a friendship; this is simply a business agreement between landlord and tenant. I give her a ten-day notice to vacate in accordance with Louisiana state law, and let her know that I am leaving for Houston tomorrow and will be there for the majority of next week, and that I do not want her in the house by the time I am home to recover from surgery.

Come June 1^st, I will have the 2400 square foot two-story house to myself while dually responsible for all thirteen hundred dollars of rent. It would appear that my new “normal” is aligned with a black hole that is very quickly closing in around me.

Recognizing that I need to change my mind’s focus, I pack my bags and my dog, Shimmy, in my car and lock the door to Cortez Street behind me. It is a bittersweet feeling knowing that I haven’t the faintest idea if or when I will return. One thing is for sure; however, if or when I do return, it will never be the same as it once was.

Before heading to Jewel Street, I drive to the Lakefront Marina just blocks away from my childhood home. Shimmy and I get out of the car at my favorite place on Earth; the boulders that line the lake just past the no longer standing Bruning’s and the old Fitzgerald’s restaurants. A place that I have come to refer to as the West End Ruins in a post-Katrina New Orleans. Shimmy and I watch the sun make it’s daily descent, turning a bright molten red before quickly disappearing into Lake Ponchartrain, just as my pops and I had hundreds of times before. I sit for a while silently talking to him, asking for him to be with me this upcoming week.  

I drop off Shimmy and my bags at my mothers house and together my mama and I join my sisters at the Little Tokyo in Mid-City for dinner together before Judy, Raegan, and I’s departure tomorrow. The dinner is not at all tense considering the circumstance; in fact, most of the dinner is spent laughing and reminiscing mostly at my expense. We argue over the details of the conversation during the car ride to my uncles fishing camp where I morbidly joked that I had a brain tumor, noting my intuition as well as my mothers.

The Buckley ladies cannot help themselves in poking fun at the speed and amount of which I have been doing just about everything, especially talking; and I cannot help myself in responding far too quickly with one of my favorite phrases of the past few weeks, “Dexamethasone is one hell of a drug.” It is a rare occurrence when four of the five Buckley ladies can agree on one thing and everyone beside myself is in agreeance that they are looking forward to the day that I am no longer on steroids. From what I understand, unlike most, the steroids have me feeling like “twenty million dollars,” I have been saying for these past couple of weeks.

While we wait for our sushi everyone is locked in conversation, but I am not at all present; I am lost in my own thoughts. I have refrained thus far from asking the question, “why me”, knowing that I would only end up arguing with myself why not; but as I stare at what is left of my house salad, I ask myself the question “why”, but more on a biological level. Sad and angry at the state of my body, I mindfully make an attempt at picking up my full glass of water with my left hand. I am silently hoping that it can match the strength of my will. Staring intently at my hand whose fingers are wrapped tightly around the glass, I watch as it slips out of my grip and spills over the white tablecloth as all three of my sisters’ forcefully push their seats back from the table in unison.

Looking around the table at their faces, they are all visibly upset; annoyed by my typical graceless negligence while we scramble for napkins and dishrags to wipe off their work outfits. Their expressions take an empathetic turn upon my defeated admittance to having tried to pick up the glass with my troubled hand. Ellen, who is most soaked is obviously saddened but makes sure to tell me that, “I should have known better,” while she uncomfortably fidgets with her water stained dress. She is rightfully upset. I did know better.

Getting into bed in my sisters old bedroom at the end of the evening, I pull out my laptop. It takes some time for it boot up, as there are twenty or more tabs open from my last session of brain tumor home schooling. I had been reading about the right temporal lobe and subsequently the cerebral cortex, after learning that it was the lobe with which my tumor was located during my visit with Dr. Prahbu. There were also tabs about the thalamus, and the corpus callosum; a couple of the words that I had jotted down during my appointment along with Seoul Garden (KBBQ).

I read about the connection between the hand and the brain. It is an interesting read, as seldom does one stop to contemplate the multitude of involuntary actions your brain makes when performing the simple act of picking up a glass of water. The coordination that it takes for the brain to produce even the simplest of movements is incredibly complex, and not surprisingly, the neural control of the hand is considered to be among the most complex of all of our internal motor systems. The brain must perceive the distance of the object; determine which muscles to use and the force with which to use them; judge how to position the hand; reach, and grasp; and it does all of these things harmoniously. My mind wanders wondering about the inventor of the claw machine, but surely this is because I had been talking to my pops earlier who never met a claw machine that he did not like.