The Chronology of Water - Lidia Yuknavitch [19]
But another tricky thing about zombieland is that in the dimension of dreams you might experience body distortions, vibrations, or weird shaking. The key was not to panic. It didn’t mean you were turning into a Quaker. It was normal. It meant your body was ready to “go” where your mind was taking it. It meant you were going on the nod.
And there is no such thing as time. No past, no present, no future. Or else they are all there at once. So the slowing and slurring of language, the heaviness in your legs, the oddity of your hands turning to giant leaden balls that swing slowly from your arms, the big wad of pillowcase in your mouth, these are all body modifications needed to go where you are going. Though I distinctly remember things going better when I did not leave the apartment. I had, for lack of a better phrase, night blindness and dumb girl head out in the world. Plus there was the problem of legs and arms.
Or maybe I saw the world for what it was, no place for a girl like me. Why not … leave?
There were other, not cool times. Like the time I woke up under an overpass with my face against asphalt in a pool of my own vomit with my pants down around my ankles. Or the time I woke up in some blond and blue-eyed Karate guy’s bed with leather twine around my neck. Or the time I fell from a second floor balcony and cracked my head, the woman with the latex gloves touching my forehead in the ambulance saying, “Lidia, can you still see me? Stay awake for me, Lidia. Good girl.” She looked like an underwater white octopus lady. Pretty though.
I’m a strong bodied person. And the thing of it was, the things I thought would kill me in my life, maybe even the things I wished had, didn’t. What, I distinctly remember thinking, did I have left to lose? Crossing the blood-brain barrier. The mind body barrier. The reality dream barrier. All that euphoria filling up the hole of me. No pain. No thought. Just images to follow.
I was a zombie for a spell in Lubbock. In Austin. In Eugene.
It wasn’t epic compared to the other wounds in my life.
Rehab and relapse and remember all start with the letter R.
What It’s Not
THIS IS NOT ANOTHER STORY ABOUT ADDICTION.
It’s not The Heroin Diaries and it’s not Trainspotting and it’s not William Burroughs and it’s not a Million Fucking Little Pieces, OK? I’m not gonna be on Oprah and I don’t have a series of meaningful vignettes to relate that can compete with the gazillion other stories of druglife. It’s not Crank and it’s not Tweak and it’s not Smack. No matter how marketable the addiction story has become, this is not that story. My life is more ordinary. More like … more like everyone’s.
Addiction, she is in me, sure enough. But I want to describe something else to you. Smaller. A smaller word, a smaller thing. So small it could travel a bloodstream.
When my mother tried to kill herself for the first time I was 16. She went into the spare bedroom of our Florida home for a long time. I knocked on the door. She said, “Go away, Belle.”
Later she came out and sat in the living room. I went into the spare bedroom and found a bottle of sleeping pills - most of which were gone. Alone in the house with her, I scooped up an armful of vodka bottles and pills and brought them to her in the living room, my eyes full of water and fear, my mind racing. She looked at me more sharply than I ever remembered, and more focused than I’d ever seen her. Her voice was weirdly stern and two octaves lower than the southern cheery slurry drawl I was used to. She said: “Stay away; this isn’t anything for you. I’m not talking about anything.” And she turned her gaze to the television. General Hospital was on.
I went straight into the bathroom and sat on the toilet and ate a wad of toilet paper. My face felt hot enough to ignite. I cried hard. That hard kind of cry that brings guttural grunting rather