When I found out a couple weeks ago that I will be having major surgery, it inspired me to make some home improvements within the next couple days. For starters, I had been sleeping on a memory foam mattress on the floor - I bought a bed frame, with storage space, and now the boxes that'd been in the corner of my room are out of sight. I also went to the bank to trade in a 20 dollar bill for quarters - the laundry room here doesn't have a change machine and I have often been out of quarters, perpetually chipping away at my laundry by hand washing it in the sink - low level depression housekeeping. The same day I got the quarters I did all my laundry, taking care of that subpar living condition that's often gnawed at my subconscious. I also stopped going to bed at 3:00 and waking up at 1:00, instead going to bed at midnight and waking up at 9:00. It's crazy how soon I changed, and I'm not completely sure why I'm doing it - the bed frame is going to help me when I'm recovering from surgery, instead of having to crawl into the floor, and making more space will help if a nurse has to stay with me for a while...
There is another aspect of my life that hasn't changed all, however, and to me it's more important because it has to do with the soul instead of the material world, and that is that I don't go into the world. Yes I wake up early now, but for what? I still stay in my apartment by myself watching horror movies, crocheting, doing my Yiddish lessons, reading, trying to write, things I deem worthy, but it's not something I'm proud of, to be so solitary, to look out the window and see the beautiful changing colors of the leaves and not to be out there. Things that I thought would work out when I moved to Michigan a little over a year ago quickly fell apart, attempts at friendships fell through, I even tried dating when I first moved here, to get over the hurt of my separation, and guys so boring and unattractive I can't even picture them now, but that were the best that online dating had to offer, ghosted or stood me up.
I am my own best friend and enjoy my own company, but there's so much nature that's beautiful here, and it's where my parents are from, i could be going to visit the city where my deceased mom grew up, I could be going to cool Detroit, the beautiful upper peninsula, or to Niagara Falls, someplace I have never been to, unlike those other places I visited as a teenager, but a place I have long been fascinated with, after seeing the Marilyn Monroe movie Niagara and reading a piece of historical fiction about it, in addition to having a particular interest in that type of tourist attraction. I just stay here. And I could say that this is because of the depression caused by the trauma of recent events but I have always kind of been like this, unless I have another person to take me places. The poem I wrote, I hardly ever did, is exactly true. I do think I can blame it a little bit on being an only child and having to amuse myself so much and not having a ton of friends, and being a city girl, but even if that's true, I hate excuses. I have wasted some opportunities for interesting experiences so shamefully! My mom and I used to have to take like two or three buses to go to Hollywood Boulevard when I was young, and as an adult, my first husband and I lived on Hollywood Boulevard, both unemployed with plenty of time on our hands when we first moved there. He would walk the boulevard every day and befriend some of the costumed people who posed for pictures for money, which I had always been interested in doing, and saw celebrities sometimes, or just come home invigorated from being amongst the tourists so excited to be there -- I would just be indoors watching movies and doing crafts, only sometimes writing or reading!
As I write this I remember that I have also adventured a lot more than some people I talk to. I've been to Poland - we made friends in a small town with this sweet punk brother and sister who usually spent the night under a tarp when they went to the small downtown, because it was fun at night and their family's farm was a long walk - we got drunk in their tent with the pouring rain outside making a racket, and ended up having to walk to their farm the next day because I'd been wearing the sister's bracelets and forgot to give them back. The walk was over a mile and the fields were full of blue flowers. And here I am, about to be on the operating table sometime within the next couple months, with the possibility of death and the certainty of a long recovery, and I am just here, sitting sitting sitting.
One thing that makes me feel better about it is that at least I read a lot. When I read I am fully engrossed in the story, and I read stories that take place in other times and places, stories that have nothing to do with my demographic at all. When I start to feel like, "Well, at least that's something," unfortunately, I remember this quote from Gustave Flaubert 's Madame Bovary I copied into a notebook when I read it in college: "The books she read had made her reality seem cheap and unendurable." I think I read BECAUSE my life is a little cheap and unendurable, but her character would probably say the same thing.
As usual, I wish my personal essays were more poetic, I'm aware of a shaggy dog essence, and I don't know how to end it. Maybe tomorrow I will make a friend, though honestly I'm a little picky. Maybe tomorrow I'll get discovered by a movie star who wants to turn my novella or one of my stories into a screenplay and I will move back to L.A. and have enough money to live comfortably there. Hopefully my surgery happens soon, since I'm anxious about it, and hopefully it goes very well. Tah-dah?
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