One of my favorite macabre facts used to be about scurvy symptoms, namely, that sufficiently advanced scurvy causes the reopening of wounds, as Vitamin C is required for the collagen from which your body creates scar tissue. Unfortunately, I don't know many cis straight people, and everyone else has watched The Terror or been a good friend to someone who has.
The last time I was in therapy regularly was shortly after my father died, over ten years ago. I've thought about going back at least once a year for the last eight or so years, but something always comes up, and anyway, I'm a talk therapy skeptic for most of the things I'm still dealing with. I never needed help understanding that what was done to me was wrong, or even understanding what was done to me. I had read books about how people like me survive before I was even old enough to secure my own therapist, and I was never really honest with any of them about what had been done to me; why would I be? They didn't need to know and I don't like talking about it. Family trait. I realized today that I haven't thought about it once this year, nor at the end of last year, when the crisis was already building for both of us, my home and my mind. It gave me pause today, because I have been behaving in a shameful manner since Monday: cancelling obligations, hiding from the need to go outside and pitch in on the work. Giving money, sure, dropping off some supplies, but doing the bare minimum in a time that calls for more. And there are reasons for this: multiple very bad sinus headaches, nausea. But those reasons are because I haven't been sleeping, and I haven't been sleeping because, wait for it...
What can you do when your own mind collapses? When you knew it would collapse and that all you could do was wait and hope for okay timing and be aware of your limits and the inevitability of the fall? Structural instability can't be ignored forever. They keep saying we're overdue for the big one on the west coast, but also that it might not matter, it might go in 300 years, it's an inexact science; but that's just comforting pablum, isn't it? It will happen. In 2020 my city burned, my coworker died, my grandfather died, and the collapse didn't happen, and didn't happen, and didn't happen. Instead it happened in 2022, late but also right on time, and I don't think I adequately reinforced the beams when I rebuilt. I know damn good and well I never got around to patching the roof. My wife's grandmother died and she barely has time to breathe through it. What will happen to all of us when this is over, if it's ever over?
People keep calling this a war, but it's not. Some parts of the city may feel like a war zone, and we do have our dead, but it's not a war. I don't mean "a war is a shooting war", I mean it's not a war at all; it's just state terror, which the US has experienced many times before. If it was a war I think my customers would have to mention it, for one, even if just to reschedule meetings. But I haven't lost power, or run out of food, or worried about drafted or enlisted relatives. I haven't even had to flee to a bomb shelter. I don't say this to downplay what is happening, which is horrific and terrifying, but rather to state, for the record, that I think most of us are not ready for the futures we dream about. We reach for descriptors that are simultaneously exaggerated and inadequate; we argue about electoral politics; we say "oh yeah no they're concentration camps for real", and then we go to work, because we have to.
But it could become a war. Very easily, it could become a war.
The collapse is humiliating in part because of its circumscribed nature. I am not normally suicidal. I'm not even normally self-harming. I have been, sometimes, in very extreme situations, but as a rule, particularly since I moved away, I'm not. What this means is that there's a limit to how bad things can get, and I know it, and my brain knows it too. (You don't get to pretend they're the same thing during the collapse.) When I was younger it was more like a hurricane: destructive, awful, a deceptive period of calm surrounded by the worst fucking time of your life, but eventually over. Well-trodden ground, usually, for the locals and for the media. Now, it feels more like a freak snowstorm somewhere snow shouldn't happen. Quiet, but not peaceful. Beautiful, and a miserable way to go.
In other words, I am fine and I'll be fine. But god, it sucks.
I told someone the other day, "lmao, well, either we'll be too dead to care or things will get better, but either way we'll be fine". They looked at me funny. I kind of want to schedule a follow-up for spring 2027, like hey, bus stop rando, it's been a year, have you collapsed yet? You get it now, right? Right? Right? Right? Right?
Marimar Martinez testified before Congress about her experience being brutalized by ICE. She's going to be at Trump's State of the Union address. I hope she's okay; I hope the trauma doesn't bury her. She has endured the unendurable and she gave an interview where she said that she is Renee Good and Alex Pretti's voice now, a survivor that they thought they'd killed. She is a hero.
Elizabeth Zuna Caisaguano and her mother are coming home. They are expediting an attempt to deport Liam Ramos and his father. Tom Homan says ICE won't leave until we stop being so mean to them. I need to write valentines for the children who are trapped inside. We will be going to a different church this week for another combined service, the church near where Alex Pretti was murdered. They're negotiating DHS funding. Renee Good's brothers testified before Congress and I haven't been able to Google much about it, how they talked about her, if they tap-danced around the reality of Renee's widow and child. I know the father was a Trump fan because Trump knows it. I hope to God her family doesn't turn her life into a lie, but I'm gay and middle-aged, so I know how far hope goes in Main Street America. Then again, I never would have predicted any of this, so maybe I don't.
Another one of my favorite macabre facts: we now know that the human eye can serve as a resivoir for Ebola; we know this in part because an American doctor, cured of Ebola, came home and his eye changed color. The virus was still in there. The eyes and testicles are immune-privileged sites: if your eye behaved like most of the rest of your body, you'd go blind almost immediately upon birth. They did eventually cure him, and luckily, he didn't go blind. I've thought about this story a lot since post-viral syndrome became such an issue with COVID, and since I looked in the mirror and saw lines, deposits, spots, that I knew wouldn't go away. The human body is a home: peel back the wallpaper and you might find lead paint, black mold, or signs of carpenter ants. The human mind is a room: knock down a wall and you might find a rat's nest, a pile of old razors, old knob and tube, or simply a yowling void where you'd hoped some insulation might be.
I wrote this yesterday and waited until I had met my commitments to return, review, and post. The sun is out, the birds are chirping, ICE loves to drive very slowly past my local school during midday watch, when there are fewer of us. Looking like a huge bitch has never served me better. We'll keep going. Spring is coming, and they are not going to break us; not even me, with my fuckass brain.
