Barg's Lament

January 2001

Today I cleaned the toilet. And there were other clues. I showered, applied for some jobs, bought some food, cleaned rotten leftovers out of the fridge, took my last two hundred dollars out of the bank so I could keep an eye on it.

My friends worry I may be back on drugs. Loss of weight, pale, up all night and smoking like a fiend. J says she dreamed me all in black with a silver shirt standing underneath a bridge on drugs. T and K just gingerly asked me if I’m okay. S is upset because she watched me go down several times before in my life. She knows the slide, is trying not to go herself.

It’s not drugs this time. But it’s the same depressing dance. Staying up all night, chain smoking, not eating, not bathing, isolating. Friends can’t get through on the telephone cause I’m on the internet day and night. Playing hearts. I’m so restless, yet unable to move. Avoiding work, avoiding everything, with two hundred dollars to my name. It’s such an old story I’m almost used to it by now. The panic, the forgetfulness, the vagueness, the avoidance. Skin begins to look like leather. Trying to figure out how to get me back. Or get the me I like best back.

Stupor. Seeking refuge in inertia.* Had to take it all the way down before I could begin to rise back up. What is it with me?

I've lived so long in my head, apart from my skin, my liver, my legs, my heart. C liked it that way. He's dead now, died of liver cancer before the age of 60. It was so long ago, that beautiful, strange, disappointing love. I left him to go find some light and moved in with jazz and drugs. But that was long ago too. Drugs were a long time ago. I did a decade in talk therapy after drugs. Got more functional. Got a few more life skills. But.

The stupor keeps returning. I still head for the stupor. And that’s what's got to change. Because I’m over 50 now. I’ve risen from the ashes so many times, I don’t know how many more times I can make it up. So this has to be studied. Felt. I’ve got to take control. Get some structure. Dream a new dream. How many times have I said this?

It doesn’t matter that the country’s just turned evil with a government wanting to drag us back into the middle ages. It doesn’t matter that I’ve only got $200 to my name and lots of people I owe. It doesn’t matter that my rich relations don't want to help me out. It doesn’t matter that my mother is dying in a retirement home in Arkansas. It doesn’t matter that it’s January, dark, cold, sleepless and undernourished.

One more time. I’m gonna raise it one more time. But this time’s going to be different. This time it’s going to stick.

I’ll start where I am. Crashed and burned yet again. Skin like a hyde, thinning hair, bags and circles under eyes, muscles sagging, teeth in disrepair, lungs full of soot and despair, apartment dirty, cluttered, no job, no money, no energy, no detectable life force.

But that’s okay. It’s where I’ve got to start from. And things are looking up. Today I cleaned the toilet.

* Julia Kristeva