The important thing is I'm back, in the flesh at least. Also gradually spiriting into the flesh, or fleshing out the spirit, or something like that. I have this persistent image of a rigid container with a flexible liner, perhaps to hold water. All the water has drained out, so the flexible liner has collapsed. My spirit is the flexible liner (although the rigid shell of my body has undergone some abrading also). Or, the rigid container is the room into which I've moved, already populated by the books and ornaments and papers of another writer, liver of an active life, participant in the very building of the house. My possessions are a flexible liner superimposed on the room and its paraphernalia, presenting a temporary home for my person, who is a Picasso-painting dot down in the bottom corner. Or, the shape of the 24-hour day (setting aside the concertina of Alaska's light and dark) is the rigid container; the daily schedule I've been urged to create and adhere to is the flexible/variegated liner to contain my wayward self.
Where was I...The "place of no shoelaces" was perplexing this time. The familiar faces were a comfort in most cases. Two staff members I hadn't met before were problems for me--and vice versa, I'm sure, but some of what I received at their hands was horrendous/abusive and wrong. Inconsistency, too, in much of the actual treatment information, and outright misrepresentation of several things in my discharge notes. Even with my level of education and reasoning skills, I am/was fragmented enough that I had to assemble this inconsistency and misrepresentation from my own fragmented consciousness. Piece by piece in my notebook, writing helped me to understand what I hadn't in a conversation, or to juxtapose what was said at one time and another and cognize the shortfall. Imagine how someone with less education and reasoning habitus, a non-writer--i.e. a typical patient in that institution--would cope with these treatment issues. As is probably obvious, it's unclear to me how much detail I'm comfortable sharing on this. Trying not to get myself started, or I'll go on for hours and cry, and it might be inappropriate. But I'm troubled.
Where was I with summer? This past week up in Anchorage was the warmest I've known AK to be. Close to 80 degrees! We were let out in the courtyard as much as possible--lovely. When I left, the house looked like this:
a week later, all the snow is gone. We're going to plant potatoes! Yes, it's June...
And where was I with unpacking and that creation of a flexible but strong container for myself up here? Tormented by feeling I should shed more stuff, of course. There's a whole post to be written on the fallacy of economies of scale, a lesson I keep having to relearn. But I'm also finding ways to be okay with having "stuff" through innovative storage. The main thing I have a lot of is books. I am looking into more reliance on electronics but the fact remains that I love books. I'm a classical scholar, after all. And an MFA student, not to be forgotten. Times in the past I've moved and let all my books go, there have been those that are irreplaceable and many that I've missed. So, I present: moving-boxes that double as shelving!
This isn't all of them (two bigger boxes on the floor, and maybe a box-worth more still at the cabin), and I haven't by any stretch finished organizing them. I won't be able to alphabetize; it'll have to be by size. And the stacking of boxes definitely needs more thought. Probably to go on my schedule as fun activity that's also productive.
So. I've missed y'all and I've missed this blog, as disconnected from it as I may have seemed. How precious it was to find comments from dear friends amid the 90-ish spam comments I waded through before writing this post. Precious to see your names there; precious to read your thoughts and advice.
Love and words...
