tuckova

In the early stages of some neurodegenerative diseases, the brain starts firing more than usual. Normally as we age parts of our brains start to close down. As if the brain were a grand manor and some of the rooms, rarely if ever used, were gently draped in white sheets, with the brain's butlers locking the doors of the rooms to which we will not be returning. But with these diseases, these unused rooms are thrown wide open, as if for some tremendous party, some great revival, a revelation. The truth is that the brain realizes that the more frequently used rooms are about to be burned down and it's trying to make space for the thoughts that once inhabited those rooms, before they are lost forever. It will not succeed, but I like that it tries.

Similarly, or it seems similar to me now, the rush of happiness experienced by people who have decided to commit suicide. The serenity that looks like they've cheered up just before you find out that they did not.

I've noticed that many people in my life seem to be one or the other: those who do not seem to enjoy my whirling busyness, for whatever their reasons may be (liking me better when more reflective? viewing all this flurry as vainglorious on some level?); and those who don't like when I try to talk about the flip side of it, that my noisy busy brain is also filled with petty spite, self-doubt, overwhelming sorrow ("Chin up!" or "You're always so negative!" or "You have to stop focusing on those things"). I don't have any solutions. Most of the time I think that my acquired fluency in extroversion is interesting at best, and that I want to go back to my mother tongue now, the language of books and silence, waking alone in a sunbeam; no more feedback from anything beyond the dustmotes I stir with my breath. 

I like smoking on the balcony and watching a storm come in, the blue sky swallowed by clouds, the mix of tobacco and petrichor and the birds going crazy, a girl in a rainsoaked dress running barefoot, her shoes in her hand. I like when the SMS code to check my bank balance spells out a word. My favorite word is still bed because it looks like one. I like walking home in the middle of the street. The small and large kindnesses we do for each other. Postcards. Listening. The idea of being your own cheerleader but not letting it go to your head; how would that work. I still can't play the ukulele.